22 Years

The oldest USB drive I own, possibly the first I owned personally rather than just using at work, is a freebie from WinHEC (the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) in New Orleans in 2003.  Its 16Mb capacity seemed great compared to the 1.44Mb floppy drives that were common at the time.  

The newest USB drive I own is also the first I have with a USB-C connector, and is 256Gb in capacity.  That's about 16,000 times bigger.  It's also physically a lot smaller, and immeasurably faster - literally.  The benchmarking took I tried doesn't work on drives so small or slow!

Lexar is still around as a brand, mostly making flash memory products much as it did in 2003.  At that time Samsung was a relatively minor brand producing relatively cheap electronics.  Respectable but not exactly cutting edge.  Now they are a pretty dominant brand in electronics - they have come a long way.

Of course, the new operating system, the device driver models and the developer tools announced at WinHEC 2003 by Bill Gates in his big keynote speech have long been consigned to the technical graveyard, but their great grandchildren live on.  Microsoft dominated the corporate world in 2003 and still does today.  Many of the products I used then like Outlook and Excel I still use today, along with millions of others.

Everything changes, but everything stays the same!