Who Actually Invented the Thumb Drive?


In 2000, at a commerce truthful in Germany, an obscure Singapore firm known as Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state reminiscence chip encased in plastic and hooked up to a Common Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the scale of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of knowledge and required no exterior energy supply, drawing energy straight from a pc when linked. It was known as the ThumbDrive.

That machine, now recognized by a wide range of names—together with reminiscence stick, USB stick, flash drive, in addition to thumb drive—modified the way in which laptop recordsdata are saved and transferred. In the present day it’s acquainted worldwide.


The thumb drive was an prompt hit, garnering lots of of orders for samples inside hours. Later that 12 months, Trek went public on the Singapore inventory change, and in 4 months—from April by means of July 2000—it manufactured and bought greater than 100,000 ThumbDrives below its personal label.

Goodbye, floppy disk

Earlier than the invention of the thumb drive, laptop customers saved and transported their recordsdata utilizing floppy disks. Developed by IBM within the Sixties, first 8-inch and later 5 ¼-inch and three ½-inch floppy disks changed cassette tapes as essentially the most sensible moveable storage media. Floppy disks have been restricted by their comparatively small storage capability—even double-sided, double-density disks may retailer only one.44 MB of knowledge.

In the course of the Nineties, as the scale of recordsdata and software program elevated, laptop corporations looked for alternate options. Private computer systems within the late Eighties started incorporating CD-ROM drives, however initially these may learn solely from prerecorded disks and couldn’t retailer user-generated knowledge. The Iomega Zip Drive, known as a “superfloppy” drive and launched in 1994, may retailer as much as 750 MB of knowledge and was writable, nevertheless it by no means gained widespread reputation, partly on account of competitors from cheaper and higher-capacity arduous drives.

Laptop customers badly wanted an affordable, high-capacity, dependable, moveable storage machine. The thumb drive was all that—and extra. It was sufficiently small to slide in a entrance pocket or dangle from a keychain, and sturdy sufficient to be rattled round in a drawer or tote with out injury. With all these benefits, it successfully ended the period of the floppy disk.

$7 billion

In 2021, world gross sales of thumb drives from all producers surpassed $7 billion, a quantity that’s anticipated to rise to greater than $10 billion by 2028.

However Trek 2000 hardly grew to become a family title. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek’s CEO, Henn Tan, didn’t change into as well-known as different {hardware} pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his house of Singapore, few individuals know of Tan or Trek.

Why aren’t they extra well-known? In spite of everything, mainstream corporations together with IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, in the end, Verbatim licensed Trek’s know-how for their very own reminiscence stick units. And a bunch of different corporations simply copied Tan with out permission or acknowledgment.

Competing claims in regards to the reminiscence stick’s origin

Thumbdrives photographed from below to look like a collection of skyscrapers. Maurizio Di Iorio

The story of the thumb drive reveals a lot about innovation within the silicon age. Seldom can we attribute innovations in digital know-how to 1 particular person or firm. They stem as an alternative from tightly knit networks of people and corporations working cooperatively or in competitors, with advances made incrementally. And this incremental nature of innovation implies that controlling the unfold, manufacturing, and additional growth of latest concepts is sort of unimaginable.

So it’s not stunning that overlapping and competing claims encompass the origin of the thumb drive.

In April 1999, the Israeli firm M-Techniques filed a patent software titled “Structure for a Common Serial Bus-based PC flash disk.” This was granted to Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan in November 2000. In 2000, IBM started promoting M-Techniques’ 8-MB storage units in america below the less-than-memorable title DiskOnKey. IBM has its personal declare to the invention of a side of the machine, primarily based on a year-2000 confidential inside report written by one in every of its workers, Shimon Shmueli. Considerably much less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have additionally claimed to be the primary to provide you with the thumb drive.

The mandatory components have been actually ripe for choosing within the late Nineties. Flash reminiscence grew to become low cost and sturdy sufficient for shopper use by 1995. The circulation of knowledge by way of the World Broad Internet, together with software program and music, was exploding, rising a requirement for moveable knowledge storage.

When know-how pushes and shoppers pull, an invention can appear, on reflection, virtually inevitable. And the entire purported inventors may actually have provide you with the identical important machine independently. However not one of the many unbiased tales of invention paint fairly as clear an origin story—or had as a lot affect on the unfold of the thumb drive—as the story of Tan in Singapore.

Henn Tan: From truant to entrepreneur

Man with glasses sits in office chair surrounded by office furniture and computer terminalsHenn Tan, proven right here in 2017, fought a collection of principally dropping battles in opposition to those that pirated Trek 2000’s ThumbDrive design and in opposition to rival patent claims. Yen Meng Jiin/Singapore Press/AP

Tan, the third of six brothers, was born and raised in a kampung (village) within the neighborhood of Geylang, Singapore. His mother and father, working arduous to make ends meet, usually left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets.

The primary in his household to attend highschool, Tan shortly fell in with a rebellious crowd, skipping faculty to hang around at roadside “sarabat” (drink) stalls, wearing “shaggy embroidered denims, imbibing espresso and cigarettes, and tossing his lengthy mane as he polemicized about rock music and human rights,” in accordance with a 2001 article within the Straits Occasions. After a caning for truancy in his third 12 months of highschool that served as a wake-up name, Tan settled right down to his research and accomplished his O-level exams. He entered the Nationwide Service in 1973 as a navy police teacher, and after serving the required two years, he took a job as a machinist at a German multinational agency.

This wasn’t a uncommon job on the time. Within the late Sixties Singapore had launched into a crash program of industrialization, providing incentives to multinational corporations, particularly in such high-tech fields as electronics and semiconductors, to arrange factories on the island. By the early Seventies, Singapore was house to manufacturing vegetation for Fairchild Semiconductor, Normal Electrical, Hewlett Packard, and Texas Devices, amongst others, joined by Matsushita (now Panasonic) in 1973 and Nippon Electrical Firm (now NEC) in 1977.

Tan diligently saved cash to pay for driving classes. As quickly as he had his license, NEC’s semiconductors division employed him as a gross sales government. Three years later, in 1980, he moved to Sanyo as a regional gross sales supervisor. Over the following 15 years, he rose to the rank of gross sales director, accumulating a wealth of expertise within the electronics trade, together with connections to a variety of suppliers and clients.

The Asian electronics trade takes off

In 1995, Tan resigned from Sanyo and bought Trek, a small, family-run electronics element buying and selling agency in his previous neighborhood of Geylang, for simply shy of US $1 million. He deliberate to develop merchandise to license or promote to a number of of the numerous giant multinationals in Singapore.

In the meantime, worldwide gross sales of laptop gear had began to increase. Though private computer systems and varied moveable computer systems had been round for the reason that late Seventies, each Apple and IBM launched flagship laptops in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Together with the recognition of laptops got here a rising demand for peripherals reminiscent of shows, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, arduous drives, CD-ROM drives, and floppy drives. The dot-com increase of 1995 to 2000 additional elevated demand for private computing gear.

“Clones, in a way, are marvelous….it meant you will need to have a good suggestion and it is best to profit from it, as shortly as doable.”—Henn Tan, as advised to the Straits Occasions

Many of those electronics merchandise, together with the chips in them, have been produced in Asia, together with Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand—and Singapore—below the OEM system. These “unique gear producers” made computer systems for Apple, Dell, and different corporations who outsourced the manufacturing of their designs.

By the mid-Nineties, Singapore had change into an essential hub for electronics manufacturing, together with arduous drives and semiconductor wafers, and the island had a major and rising electronics ecosystem with design and manufacturing experience.

Toshiba provides Tan his massive break

All this exercise, nevertheless, didn’t create a straightforward path for Tan. Lots of his previous contacts from Sanyo wouldn’t do enterprise with a no-name like Trek. And few gifted engineers wished to work for an organization that appeared to supply little assure of long-term employment. However Tan continued, and after two years, in 1998, he bought his massive break: Toshiba Electronics in Singapore appointed Trek as an official design home, an settlement by means of which Trek would design and manufacture merchandise to be bought below the Toshiba label.

Particularly, Toshiba wished an MP3 participant, a compact and moveable solid-state machine that would copy music recordsdata from a pc, to which it might be linked by way of a USB plug, after which play the music again. Although this was earlier than Apple’s 2001 iPod made these units fashionable worldwide, plenty of MP3 gamers of assorted high quality have been already in the marketplace within the late Nineties.

Because the originator of flash reminiscence, Toshiba manufactured storage chips utilized in private computer systems, laptops, and digital cameras. Toshiba additionally made moveable radios and increase packing containers. It wasn’t odd that the corporate wished to leap into the MP3-player fray.

However Tan reasoned that “if the corporate simply manufactured the participant, it might not make some huge cash,” in accordance with a 2005 article within the Straits Occasions. Tan thought that by leaving out the flexibility to play music, the machine would change into extra versatile, in a position to deal with not simply MP3s but additionally textual content, spreadsheets, pictures—any form of laptop file. Many corporations have been already promoting music gamers, however an affordable, USB-driven, versatile storage machine may need a good larger market, Tan suspected, and he could possibly be first to faucet it.

Tan did give Toshiba its music participant. However he additionally set his engineers to work on a product that was basically a music participant with out the participant. The consequence was the thumb drive.

From fashionable product to pirate battle

a block diagram with the words USB Connector, D12 (Driver), Micro-Controller, Flash Memory, Additional USB port, ROM, RAM, and Hard-lock Switch appearing in individual rectanglesTrek’s patent software for the ThumbDrive included this drawing.

Attending to a working product was not trivial—the drive required not solely the suitable mixture of {hardware} but additionally specifically designed firmware that allowed the solid-state storage to work together with a wide range of laptop working programs.

However the thumb drive, with its flash reminiscence and USB interface, was hardly a very novel invention. Tan didn’t invent flash reminiscence, which was the brainchild of Toshiba engineer Fujio Masuoka in 1980. Nor did he invent the USB port, which had been round since 1996. What was novel was the mix of the USB with flash reminiscence plus a controller and acceptable firmware, all sealed right into a plastic case to make a marketable shopper product.

Native circumstances can solely partly clarify why the thumb drive got here to be invented the place and when it did: Tan’s expertise at NEC and Sanyo, Trek’s contract with Toshiba, and the connections Trek’s engineers had made throughout earlier internships at different corporations in Singapore have been all essential. Those self same elements, nevertheless, additionally made the invention troublesome to manage. As soon as the thought of the thumb drive was on the market, many electronics companies instantly set to creating their very own variations. Tan had filed a patent software for his invention a month earlier than the 2000 CeBIT tech truthful, however a pending patent did little to cease copycats.

Along with claims by M-Techniques and IBM, maybe essentially the most difficult rivalry got here from the Chinese language firm Netac Know-how. It additionally claimed to have invented the flash reminiscence stick. Cheng Xiaohua and Deng Guoshun had beforehand labored for Trek and had seen some growth boards associated to flash reminiscence. They returned to Shenzhen, China, and based Netac in 1999.

Shenzhen on the time was a hotbed of electronics copycatting—DVD gamers, mobile telephones, MP3 gamers, and quite a few different shopper electronics have been produced as “shanzhai” items, outdoors the bounds of mental property legal guidelines. Netac’s declare to (and manufacturing of) its thumb drive match this sample of appropriation.

Netac and Trek subsequently even entered into an settlement below which Trek would fund a few of Netac’s analysis and growth and Trek would acquire rights to fabricate and distribute the ensuing merchandise outdoors of China. Regardless of this collaboration, Netac subsequently sought and was granted a patent on the thumb drive inside China.

Henn Tan thought that by leaving out the flexibility to play music, the machine would change into extra versatile.

Electronics pirates around the globe then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them arduous and generally received. Had Trek been a bigger firm with extra assets and extra patent expertise, the story may need had a unique ending. Because it was, although, Trek’s patents stood on comparatively weak floor. Starting in 2002, Tan introduced go well with in Singapore in opposition to a handful of corporations (together with Electec, FE International Electronics, M-Techniques, and Ritronics Parts) for patent infringement. After a number of years of courtroom battles and lots of of hundreds of {dollars} in authorized charges, Trek received that case, persuading the decide that his ThumbDrive was the primary machine ever designed to be plugged straight into a pc with out the necessity for a cable. An appeals courtroom in the UK, nevertheless, was not persuaded, and Trek misplaced its patent there in 2008. Tan additionally pursued, with little success, claims at america Worldwide Commerce Fee in opposition to different corporations, together with Imation, IronKey, Patriot, and Verbatim. However even the choice in Singapore was little greater than an ethical victory. By the late 2000s, tens of millions of thumb drives had already been produced, by numerous corporations, with out Trek’s license.

“Clones,” Tan advised the Straits Occasions in 2005, “in a way, are marvelous. Within the enterprise world, particularly if you find yourself in Asia, so long as something makes a revenue, you do it.” If somebody have been copying you, Tan reasoned, “it meant you will need to have a good suggestion and it is best to profit from it, as shortly as doable.”

In the end, Tan and Trek turned their consideration to new merchandise, every enhancing barely on the final. By 2010, Trek had developed one other pioneering machine—the Flu Drive or Flu Card. This modified thumb drive may additionally wirelessly transmit knowledge between units or to the cloud. Though Tan nonetheless tried to guard his invention with patents, he had additionally embraced a brand new path: success by means of steady novelty.

The Flu Card loved modest success. Though not broadly taken up as a stand-alone machine, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it appropriate for shopper electronics units reminiscent of cameras and toys. In 2014, Trek signed offers with Ricoh and Mattel China to license the Flu Card design.

Trek additionally tried to maneuver into new markets, with restricted success, together with the Web of Issues, cloud know-how, and medical and wearable units.

Trek’s struggles and Tan’s fall

Man with white shirt, tie, and glasses holds thumb drive labeled SWIPE close to the cameraHenn Tan holds up a ThumbDrive throughout an interview in Singapore in January 2006.Nicky Loh/Reuters/Alamy

Trek’s income from licensing the ThumbDrive and the Flu Card was not enough to maintain it worthwhile. However as an alternative of admitting how badly the corporate was doing, in 2006, Tan and his chief monetary officer started falsifying Trek’s accounts, deceiving auditors and shareholders. After these misdeeds have been revealed by monetary auditors Ernst & Younger in 2015, Tan stepped down as chairman and chief government and in August 2022 pled responsible to falsifying accounts. As of this writing, Tan stays in jail in Singapore. His son, Wayne Tan, continues as Trek’s deputy chairman.

In the meantime, the thumb drive lives on. Though most of us transmit our recordsdata over the Web—both as electronic mail attachments or by means of companies like Google Drive and Dropbox—thumb drives (now operating to capacities measured in terabytes) stay a handy machine for carrying knowledge in our pockets.

They’re used as a fast option to switch a file from one laptop to a different, cross out press kits at conferences, lock and unlock computer systems, carry apps to run on a shared laptop, again up journey paperwork, and even, generally, retailer music. They’re used for nefarious functions as nicely—stealing recordsdata or inserting malware into goal computer systems. And they’re particularly helpful for the safe switch of encrypted knowledge too delicate to ship over the Web.

In 2021, world gross sales of the units from all producers surpassed $7 billion, a quantity that’s anticipated to rise to greater than $10 billion by 2028, in accordance with Vantage Market Analysis.

Hero or antihero?

Typically, we consider inventors as heroes, boldly going the place nobody has gone earlier than. However Tan’s story isn’t that straightforward.

Tan does deserve a spot in shopper electronics historical past—he conceived the machine with out seeing one first, made it work, manufactured it in portions, and unfold it broadly, each deliberately by means of licensing and unintentionally by means of copying. However full credit score for the thumb drive actually belongs extra to the surroundings—the concepts circulating on the time and the networks of shoppers and suppliers—than any particular person.

Furthermore, the conclusion of Tan’s story suggests he’s extra antihero than hero. We often admire inventors for his or her tenacity and grit. In Tan’s case, these qualities contributed to his downfall. Decided to take ethical and monetary credit score for the thumb drive, Tan went to extraordinary lengths—even breaking the legislation—with a purpose to make his firm and himself successful. The thumb drive reveals how difficult tales of invention usually are.

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