To Look Forward, Sometimes You Have to Look Back

The thumb drive was an immediate hit, garnering a whole bunch 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 offered greater than 100,000 ThumbDrives underneath its personal label.

Good-bye, floppy disk

Before the invention of the thumb drive, pc customers saved and transported their information 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 transportable 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 information.

During the Nineteen Nineties, as the scale of information and software program elevated, pc firms looked for options. Personal 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 knowledge. 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 recognition, partly on account of competitors from cheaper and higher-capacity laborious drives.

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

But Trek 2000 hardly turned a family identify. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek’s CEO, Henn Tan, didn’t turn out to be as well-known as different {hardware} pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his residence of Singapore, few folks know of Tan or Trek.

Why aren’t they extra well-known? After all, 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 a substitute 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 recent concepts is nearly inconceivable.

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

In April 1999, the Israeli firm M-Systems filed a patent utility titled “Architecture for a Universal 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-Systems’ 8-MB storage units within the United States underneath the less-than-memorable identify DiskOnKey. IBM has its personal declare to the invention of a side of the system, primarily based on a year-2000 confidential inside report written by considered one of its staff, Shimon Shmueli. Somewhat much less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have additionally claimed to be the primary to provide you with the thumb drive.

The obligatory components have been actually ripe for selecting within the late Nineteen Nineties. Flash reminiscence turned low cost and strong sufficient for client use by 1995. The circulation of information through the World Wide Web, together with software program and music, was exploding, rising a requirement for transportable knowledge storage.

When expertise pushes and shoppers pull, an invention can appear, looking back, nearly inevitable. And the entire purported inventors may actually have provide you with the identical important system independently. But not one of the many impartial 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 collection of largely shedding battles towards those that pirated Trek 2000’s ThumbDrive design and towards 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, commonly left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets.

The first in his household to attend highschool, Tan shortly fell in with a rebellious crowd, skipping college to hang around at roadside “sarabat” (drink) stalls, wearing “shaggy embroidered jeans, imbibing coffee and cigarettes, and tossing his long mane as he polemicized about rock music and human rights,” based on a 2001 article within the Straits Times. 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 National 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. In 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 Nineteen Seventies, Singapore was residence to manufacturing crops for Fairchild Semiconductor, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, and Texas Instruments, amongst others, joined by Matsushita (now Panasonic) in 1973 and Nippon Electric Company (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 subsequent 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 massive multinationals in Singapore.

Meanwhile, worldwide gross sales of pc gear had began to growth. Although 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. Along with the recognition of laptops got here a rising demand for peripherals similar to shows, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, laborious 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 sense, are marvelous….it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible.”—Henn Tan, as informed to the Straits Times

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—underneath the OEM system. These “original equipment manufacturers” made computer systems for Apple, Dell, and different firms who outsourced the manufacturing of their designs.

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

Toshiba offers Tan his large break

All this exercise, nevertheless, didn’t create a simple path for Tan. Many 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. But Tan continued, and after two years, in 1998, he received his large 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 offered underneath the Toshiba label.

In specific, Toshiba needed an MP3 participant, a compact and transportable solid-state system that would copy music information from a pc, to which it could be linked through a USB plug, after which play the music again. Though this was earlier than Apple’s 2001 iPod made these units common worldwide, quite a few MP3 gamers of various high quality have been already available on the market within the late Nineteen Nineties.

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

But Tan reasoned that “if the company just manufactured the player, it would not make a lot of money,” based on a 2005 article within the Straits Times. Tan thought that by leaving out the flexibility to play music, the system would turn out to be extra versatile, in a position to deal with not simply MP3s but additionally textual content, spreadsheets, photographs—any sort of pc file. Many firms have been already promoting music gamers, however an affordable, USB-driven, versatile storage system may need a good greater market, Tan suspected, and he could possibly be first to faucet it.

Tan did give Toshiba its music participant. But 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 common product to pirate battle

Trek’s patent utility for the ThumbDrive included this drawing.

Getting 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 pc working methods.

But 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 applicable firmware, all sealed right into a plastic case to make a marketable client product.

Local 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 vital. Those identical elements, nevertheless, additionally made the invention troublesome to regulate. Once 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 utility for his invention a month earlier than the 2000 CeBIT tech truthful, however a pending patent did little to cease copycats.

In addition to claims by M-Systems and IBM, maybe probably the most sophisticated rivalry got here from the Chinese firm Netac Technology. 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 underneath 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. Despite 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 turn out to be extra versatile.

Electronics pirates around the globe then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them laborious and typically gained. Had Trek been a bigger firm with extra assets and extra patent expertise, the story may need had a distinct ending. As it was, although, Trek’s patents stood on comparatively weak floor. Beginning in 2002, Tan introduced swimsuit in Singapore towards a handful of firms (together with Electec, FE Global Electronics, M-Systems, and Ritronics Components) for patent infringement. After a number of years of courtroom battles and a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} in authorized charges, Trek gained that case, persuading the decide that his ThumbDrive was the primary system ever designed to be plugged straight into a pc with out the necessity for a cable. An appeals courtroom within the United Kingdom, nevertheless, was not persuaded, and Trek misplaced its patent there in 2008. Tan additionally pursued, with little success, claims on the United States International Trade Commission towards different firms, together with Imation, IronKey, Patriot, and Verbatim. But even the choice in Singapore was little greater than an ethical victory. By the late 2000s, hundreds of thousands of thumb drives had already been produced, by numerous firms, with out Trek’s license.

“Clones,” Tan informed the Straits Times in 2005, “in a sense, are marvelous. In the business world, especially when you are in Asia, as long as anything makes a profit, you do it.” If somebody have been copying you, Tan reasoned, “it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible.”

Ultimately, Tan and Trek turned their consideration to new merchandise, every bettering 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. Although 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. Although 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 Internet of Things, 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. But 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 have been revealed by monetary auditors Ernst & Young 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.

Meanwhile, the thumb drive lives on. Although most of us transmit our information over the Internet—both as e-mail attachments or by means of providers like Google Drive and Dropbox—thumb drives (now operating to capacities measured in terabytes) stay a handy system for carrying knowledge in our pockets.

They are used as a fast method to switch a file from one pc to a different, cross out press kits at conferences, lock and unlock computer systems, carry apps to run on a shared pc, again up journey paperwork, and even, typically, retailer music. They are used for nefarious functions as nicely—stealing information 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 Internet.

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, based on Vantage Market Research.

Hero or antihero?

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

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 means of licensing and unintentionally by means of copying. But 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.

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