Right now there are... four pen drives on my desk. They have become so common and so cheap, that this situation must repeat daily for millions of users. Now, where do they come from? How was the pen drive born? Who thought of it first? As with other revolutionary pieces of technology, the origin of the pendrives or USB drives is full of discussions, lawsuits, patent conflicts, engineers beating their chests, and multinational giants.
The computing world remembers very well that we entered the 21st century with optical drives and 3.5-inch floppy disks. Iomega's Zip disks were a true disaster (said by someone who suffered their "clicks of death" firsthand), and when backing up, we had no more robust option than to pour our digital lives onto CDs, which had to be treated with great care. However, the so-called USB memory, or as I personally prefer, pen drive, slowly began to filter into the market.
The first one I had was 256 megabytes, and it was sent to me from Switzerland. I went to internet cafés, and they thought I was some kind of alien. "That thing can't hold 170 floppy disks!" was the typical complaint, and once they saw the available capacity, they asked where they could get one. Today, that question is irrelevant. I bought a Kingston DTSE9 16GB for a few coins, and of course there are much more advanced models. But which was "the" first?
Which was the first USB drive in history?
Well... this is a complicated question if ever there was one. Pua Khein-Seng from Malaysia, one of the founders of Phison, has claimed for years the title of "father of the pen drive," and his work on USB flash controllers gives him some credit. When tracing patents, we inevitably end up at US6148354A, filed by Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of the "former" M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers. The patent was granted in April 1999, while in September of that year, Shimon Shmueli from IBM disclosed his own development, though we cannot call it a "patent". Shmueli insists he is the true inventor of the pen drive, but the story doesn't end there.
Trek Technology from Singapore and China's Netac Technology visited several courts trying to validate and defend their patents, crossing swords with some high-profile names. So, I think it would be easier to discover cold fusion than to identify the true inventor of the pen drive, but what we do know is who got to the shelves first.
It was precisely Trek Technology with its ThumbDrive, in the year 2000. The device offered eight megabytes of pure solid-state glory, and with a price under $30, it was much more accessible than imagined. IBM, with the collaboration of the aforementioned M-Systems, managed to launch a similar product that same year, dubbed DiskOnKey.
Today, the story is very different. Trek Technology never quite managed to leave the Asian market, M-Systems was acquired by SanDisk, and IBM abandoned the general consumer market, but USB drives are everywhere. They are increasingly bigger and faster. Definitely an excellent addition to our computing arsenal.
