Flash drives will prove to history to be more important than the printing press.

History will find that flash drives are a more important invention than the printing press. Really.  link http://www.promocrunch.com/history.pdf

 When I started to sell and understand USB flash drives 5 years ago, I, like most, thought it was a great business tool. Perfect for backing up my files and many other important documents.
I also thought if each person had a single 1 GB for their important files that would be more than enough. But 5 years later and after personally selling well over 1 million flash drives I am selling even more drives today. Why?

I think what has happened, that not many anticipated would happen, is that people are using many multiple flash drives each year. What for I thought?

1)
In this day and age where we have inexpensive (free) digital pictures of our lives and our surroundings taken with phones, Smartphone’s, cheap and expensive digital cameras, web cams, I pads and who knows what else, we are having that most human of all emotions come to play, the need for leaving a legacy.

2)
What do I mean by that?
Think of history. 150 or so years ago the first cameras came into our world. For the first time we were able to quickly take an image and preserve it for the people in the future to see. The people in the future could see what we wore, how we dressed and many other things.
The problem with pictures were they were expensive, hard to keep (many pictures were kept on glass plates until the first widely available film in the beginning of the 20
 st century (now!) to see what we were like, how we lived and more, they will find a humungous almost unimaginable collection of images, music, voice, video and data files all available to them to on untold millions of flash drives hidden away in drawers and closets excavated from real estate developments, old buildings etc..
3)
Think of it this way. The American Civil War which was only 146 years ago has probably 10,000 photographic images of various quality and interests still in existence. Most of these are in museums or private collections and are not easily accessed.

Today, a short time event (say 2 weeks in length) like the recent Kate and William wedding has produced an estimated 15 Million digital images all that could be saved on about a mere 3000 8 GB drives whose physical size would fit in 2 cardboard boxes, 2 feet by 2 feet by 18 inches!

4)
All of the Kate and William images are either online or are 1 step away from being online (on your computer). But what happens if your computer hard drive crashes and you can’t reclaim the info on it... (It happens..I know)...or your favourite social site disappears...(Remember how popular Classmates was...it no longer exists as it was, it’s now called Memory Lane...or MySpace was 100 times bigger than Facebook only 5 YEARS ago....and now it is struggling)

As images (and music and all files) will not disappear off of flash drives unless deleted, in another 100, 200 or more years when historians and sociologist look back in time to the early 21
th century, late 19th). The pictures couldn’t be tagged and because there was often only the original image, they were easily lost.