*snicker*There is a long and colorful history of learning how not to make an incandescent filament. It just took one particularly persistent practitioner's perspective to give such processes legitimacy. [] ]'>
I do have to say, Trash, I admire your enthusiasm, but this thread did get *pretty weird* at some points. (At one point I was convinced that you were proposing that the device in the OP was the Holy Grail for bringing a general purpose USB port to ancient Macintoshes....) Oh well, carry on!
On the subject of the device itself, it would be *mildly* interesting to crack one open and see what it comes with. (The documentation is incredibly sketchy) This appears to be the OEM of the incredibly cheap versions that are floating around. Apparently they sell separate versions for 1.44MB and 720k floppy emulation; it would be interesting to know it it's just a software difference or if the devices actually use different clock crystals or something for the different data rates. In any case, they appear to use a custom ASIC for the floppy interface, so it would probably be "somewhat difficult" (read: not going to happen) to retool this to do anything but Shugart/PC floppy emulation. And seriously, the floppy interface is the only thing of worth here. There are scads of microcontrollers out there that have sufficient USB host support to drive a USB memory stick. (If you simply *must* have that instead of, say, SD card, which is even easier to interface to practically *any* MCU.)
If I had a disk controller for my Tandy CoCo I'd probably buy a 720k version just for shniz and giggles.