The thumb drive was an instantaneous hit, garnering a whole lot of orders for samples inside hours. Later that 12 months, Trek went public on the Singapore inventory alternate, and in 4 months—from April by July 2000—it manufactured and offered greater than 100,000 ThumbDrives beneath its personal label.

Goodbye, floppy disk

Earlier than the invention of the thumb drive, pc customers saved and transported their information 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 probably the most sensible transportable storage media. Floppy disks had been restricted by their comparatively small storage capability—even double-sided, double-density disks may retailer just one.44 MB of information.

Through the Nineteen Nineties, as the scale of information and software program elevated, pc firms looked for options. Private computer systems within the late Nineteen Eighties started incorporating CD-ROM drives, however initially these may learn solely from prerecorded disks and couldn’t retailer user-generated information. The Iomega Zip Drive, known as a “superfloppy” drive and launched in 1994, may retailer as much as 750 MB of information and was writable, but it surely by no means gained widespread reputation, partly resulting from competitors from cheaper and higher-capacity laborious drives.

Pc customers badly wanted an affordable, high-capacity, dependable, transportable storage machine. The thumb drive was all that—and extra. It was sufficiently small to slide in a entrance pocket or cling 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.

However Trek 2000 hardly turned a family identify. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek’s CEO, Henn Tan, didn’t turn 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 any case, mainstream firms together with IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, in the end, Verbatim licensed Trek’s know-how for their very own reminiscence stick gadgets. And a bunch of different firms simply copied Tan with out permission or acknowledgment.

Competing claims in regards to the reminiscence stick’s origin

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 at least one particular person or firm. They stem as a substitute from tightly knit networks of people and firms 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 not possible.

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

In April 1999, the Israeli firm M-Programs filed a patent utility 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-Programs’ 8-MB storage gadgets in the US beneath the less-than-memorable identify DiskOnKey. IBM has its personal declare to the invention of a facet of the machine, primarily based on a year-2000 confidential inner report written by certainly one of its staff, Shimon Shmueli. Considerably much less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have additionally claimed to be the primary to give you the thumb drive.

The mandatory parts had been definitely ripe for choosing within the late Nineteen Nineties. Flash reminiscence turned low cost and strong sufficient for shopper use by 1995. The circulation of information by way of the World Broad Internet, together with software program and music, was exploding, rising a requirement for transportable information storage.

When know-how pushes and customers pull, an invention can appear, looking back, virtually inevitable. And all the purported inventors may definitely have give you 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

Henn Tan, proven right here in 2017, fought a sequence of principally shedding 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 laborious to make ends meet, frequently 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 firms, particularly in such high-tech fields as electronics and semiconductors, to arrange factories on the island. By the early Nineteen 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 business, together with connections to a spread of suppliers and prospects.

The Asian electronics business takes off

In 1995, Tan resigned from Sanyo and bought Trek, a small, family-run electronics element buying and selling agency in his outdated 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 massive multinationals in Singapore.

In the meantime, worldwide gross sales of pc gear had began to increase. Though private computer systems and numerous transportable computer systems had been round because the late Nineteen 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 resembling shows, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, laborious 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 you must profit from it, as shortly as potential.”—Henn Tan, as informed to the Straits Occasions

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

By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Singapore had turn into an vital hub for electronics manufacturing, together with laborious drives and semiconductor wafers, and the island had a big and rising electronics ecosystem with design and manufacturing experience.

Toshiba offers Tan his huge break

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

Specifically, Toshiba needed an MP3 participant, a compact and transportable solid-state machine that might copy music information 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 gadgets standard worldwide, a lot of MP3 gamers of assorted high quality had been already available on the market within the late Nineteen Nineties.

Because the originator of flash reminiscence, Toshiba manufactured storage chips utilized in private computer systems, laptops, and digital cameras. Toshiba additionally made transportable radios and increase packing containers. It wasn’t odd that the corporate needed 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 power to play music, the machine would turn into extra versatile, in a position to deal with not simply MP3s but additionally textual content, spreadsheets, photos—any sort of pc file. Many firms had been already promoting music gamers, however an affordable, USB-driven, versatile storage machine may need an excellent greater 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 end result was the thumb drive.

From standard product to pirate battle

Trek’s patent utility 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 quite a lot of pc working techniques.

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 mixture of the USB with flash reminiscence plus a controller and applicable 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 firms in Singapore had been all vital. Those self same elements, nonetheless, additionally made the invention tough to regulate. As soon as the concept of the thumb drive was on the market, many electronics corporations instantly set to creating their very own variations. Tan had filed a patent utility 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-Programs and IBM, maybe probably the most sophisticated 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 had 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 beneath which Trek would fund a few of Netac’s analysis and growth and Trek would achieve 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 power to play music, the machine would turn into extra versatile.

Electronics pirates all over the world then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them laborious and generally gained. Had Trek been a bigger firm with extra assets and extra patent expertise, the story may need had a special 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 firms (together with Electec, FE International Electronics, M-Programs, and Ritronics Parts) for patent infringement. After a number of years of court docket battles and a whole lot of 1000’s of {dollars} in authorized charges, Trek gained 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 court docket in the UK, nonetheless, was not persuaded, and Trek misplaced its patent there in 2008. Tan additionally pursued, with little success, claims at the US Worldwide Commerce Fee in opposition to different firms, together with Imation, IronKey, Patriot, and Verbatim. However even the choice in Singapore was little greater than an ethical victory. By the late 2000s, thousands and thousands of thumb drives had already been produced, by numerous firms, with out Trek’s license.

“Clones,” Tan informed the Straits Occasions in 2005, “in a way, are marvelous. Within the enterprise world, particularly if you end up in Asia, so long as something makes a revenue, you do it.” If somebody had been copying you, Tan reasoned, “it meant you will need to have a good suggestion and you must profit from it, as shortly as potential.”

In the end, Tan and Trek turned their consideration to new merchandise, every bettering 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 information between gadgets or to the cloud. Though Tan nonetheless tried to guard his invention with patents, he had additionally embraced a brand new path: success by steady novelty.

The Flu Card loved modest success. Though not extensively taken up as a stand-alone machine, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it appropriate for shopper electronics gadgets resembling 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 gadgets.

Trek’s struggles and Tan’s fall

Henn 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 a substitute 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 had 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 information over the Web—both as e mail attachments or by companies like Google Drive and Dropbox—thumb drives (now operating to capacities measured in terabytes) stay a handy machine for carrying information in our pockets.

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

In 2021, world gross sales of the gadgets 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?

Usually, 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 licensing and unintentionally by 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 regulation—with a purpose to make his firm and himself successful. The thumb drive reveals how sophisticated tales of invention usually are.