In 2000, at a commerce honest in Germany, an obscure Singapore firm known as Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state reminiscence chip encased in plastic and connected 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 immediately from a pc when related. It was known as the ThumbDrive.

That system, now recognized by quite a lot of names—together with reminiscence stick, USB stick, flash drive, in addition to thumb drive—modified the best way laptop recordsdata are saved and transferred. At present it’s acquainted worldwide.

The thumb drive was an instantaneous hit, garnering a whole bunch 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 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 Nineteen Sixties, first 8-inch and later 5 ¼-inch and three ½-inch floppy disks changed cassette tapes as probably 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 just one.44 MB of knowledge.

Through the Nineteen Nineties, as the scale of recordsdata and software program elevated, laptop firms 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, but it surely by no means gained widespread recognition, partly attributable to competitors from cheaper and higher-capacity arduous drives.

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

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

Why aren’t they extra well-known? In spite of everything, mainstream firms together with IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, in the end, Verbatim licensed Trek’s expertise for their very own reminiscence stick units. 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 expertise 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 signifies that controlling the unfold, manufacturing, and additional growth of latest concepts is nearly 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 facet of the system, primarily based on a year-2000 confidential inner 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 give you the thumb drive.

The required components have been definitely ripe for choosing within the late Nineteen Nineties. Flash reminiscence turned low-cost and sturdy sufficient for client use by 1995. The circulation of knowledge by way of the World Large Net, together with software program and music, was exploding, rising a requirement for moveable knowledge storage.

When expertise pushes and shoppers pull, an invention can appear, on reflection, virtually inevitable. And the entire purported inventors may definitely have give you the identical important system 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 largely 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 arduous to make ends meet, often left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets.

The primary in his household to attend highschool, Tan rapidly 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 keeping 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 army 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 Nineteen 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 Seventies, Singapore was dwelling to manufacturing vegetation for Fairchild Semiconductor, Basic 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 govt. 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 variety of suppliers and prospects.

The Asian electronics business takes off

In 1995, Tan resigned from Sanyo and bought Trek, a small, family-run electronics part 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 giant multinationals in Singapore.

In the meantime, worldwide gross sales of laptop gear had began to growth. Though private computer systems and numerous 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 similar to shows, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, arduous drives, CD-ROM drives, and floppy drives. The dot-com growth of 1995 to 2000 additional elevated demand for private computing gear.

“Clones, in a way, are marvelous….it meant you have to have a good suggestion and it’s best to take advantage of it, as rapidly as potential.”—Henn Tan, as informed 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 firms who outsourced the manufacturing of their designs.

By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Singapore had develop into an necessary hub for electronics manufacturing, together with arduous 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, nevertheless, didn’t create a simple path for Tan. Lots of his outdated contacts from Sanyo wouldn’t do enterprise with a no-name like Trek. And few proficient engineers needed to work for an organization that appeared to supply little assure of long-term employment. However Tan endured, and after two years, in 1998, he acquired 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 below the Toshiba label.

Specifically, Toshiba needed an MP3 participant, a compact and moveable solid-state system that might copy music recordsdata from a pc, to which it might be related by way of a USB plug, after which play the music again. Although this was earlier than Apple’s 2001 iPod made these units standard worldwide, plenty of MP3 gamers of various high quality have been already in the marketplace 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 moveable radios and growth bins. 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 keeping with a 2005 article within the Straits Occasions. Tan thought that by leaving out the flexibility to play music, the system would develop into extra versatile, in a position to deal with not simply MP3s but additionally textual content, spreadsheets, photographs—any type of laptop file. Many firms have been already promoting music gamers, however an inexpensive, USB-driven, versatile storage system may need a good greater market, Tan suspected, and he may very well 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 primarily a music participant with out the participant. The consequence was the thumb drive.

From standard product to pirate battle

Trek’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 quite a lot of laptop 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 acceptable firmware, all sealed right into a plastic case to make a marketable client 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 have been all necessary. Those self same components, nevertheless, additionally made the invention tough 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 honest, however a pending patent did little to cease copycats.

Along with claims by M-Techniques and IBM, maybe probably 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 client 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 system would develop into extra versatile.

Electronics pirates world wide then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them arduous and typically received. Had Trek been a bigger firm with extra sources and extra patent expertise, the story may need had a distinct 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 World Electronics, M-Techniques, and Ritronics Parts) for patent infringement. After a number of years of courtroom battles and a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} in authorized charges, Trek received that case, persuading the choose that his ThumbDrive was the primary system ever designed to be plugged immediately 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 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 when 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 have to have a good suggestion and it’s best to take advantage of it, as rapidly as potential.”

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 system—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 steady novelty.

The Flu Card loved modest success. Though not broadly taken up as a stand-alone system, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it appropriate for client electronics units similar to 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 expertise, and medical and wearable units.

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 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 govt 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 e-mail attachments or by providers like Google Drive and Dropbox—thumb drives (now working to capacities measured in terabytes) stay a handy system for carrying knowledge in our pockets.

They’re used as a fast technique to switch a file from one laptop to a different, go out press kits at conferences, lock and unlock computer systems, carry apps to run on a shared laptop, again up journey paperwork, and even, typically, 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, international 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 keeping 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 easy.

Tan does deserve a spot in client electronics historical past—he conceived the system 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 atmosphere—the concepts circulating on the time and the networks of purchasers 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—to be able to make his firm and himself successful. The thumb drive exhibits how difficult tales of invention typically are.