With our new MDC-500 you can load a program on the USB flash drive, plug it into the machine, and run the program right from the flash drive. There are other limitations, such as you can not edit the program this way because even though you can run it from the flash drive it is not actually entirely loaded into the machine memory. I ran a 37 MB program the other day with the USB drive, and it is a nice feature to have.

My opinion is that if you frequently need more than the standard 1 MB of memory either to store lots of programs or because you have larger sized individual programs, the 16 MB is the way to go and well worth the price. Otherwise, for infrequent needs the flash drive is there when you need to run a large program.

Edit: there is definately something screwy the way the capital letters are being changed to lower case.