They're ba-a-a-ack! Despite being superseded and left for dead, a few hardy technologies keep springing back to life. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes not so much...
Back in the day, networking was complicated really complicated. It took big companies with even bigger IT staffs to build the most rudimentary Ethernet networks. Ethernet cards for a PC were expensive, exotic add ons. For most people, the Internet meant AOL. Wireless wasn't much more than a dream. But people still needed to share files. In most cases, that meant putting the desired file(s) on a floppy disk, pulling the disk out of one computer and physically running it over to another computer.
With the advent of the easy, ubiquitous networking, that all changed. Floppy disks held only small amounts of data and gradually fell out of favor (and floppy drives were eventually left off of computers entirely). Anybody seen a floppy lately? Sneakernet was dead.
But then new technology brought it back to life.
The development of cheap (practically free!) USB thumb drives and flash-memory card readers has revived the practice for quickly and easily transferring files among multiple computers, printers, digital cameras, and multimedia devices. These days, just about everyone casually swaps thumb drives and memory cards because it's faster and easier than hooking up cables to get JPG or MP3 file from your camera or iPod onto your computer.
The only difference? These thumb drives and flash cards hold more than entire hard drives in heyday of sneakernet.
Oh, and there's no real name for it anymore. But if you think about it for a minute, it's just SneakerNet with different media.
Note: Netlingo says Sneakernet has also been known as tennisnet, floppynet, shoenet, and walknet. Who knew?
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