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The thumb drive was an on the spot hit, garnering a whole bunch of orders for samples inside hours. Later that yr, 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, laptop customers saved and transported their recordsdata utilizing floppy disks. Developed by IBM within the Nineteen Sixties, first 8-inch and later 5¼-inch and 3½-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 information.

During the Nineteen Nineties, as the scale of recordsdata and software program elevated, laptop firms looked for options. Personal 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 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, however it by no means gained widespread reputation, partly attributable to competitors from cheaper and higher-capacity exhausting drives.

Computer 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 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.

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 house of Singapore, few individuals know of Tan or Trek.

Why aren’t they extra well-known? After all, mainstream firms together with IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, finally, 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 concerning 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 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 recent concepts is sort of unattainable.

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 machine, based mostly on a year-2000 confidential inner report written by considered one of its workers, Shimon Shmueli. Somewhat much less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have additionally claimed to be the primary to give you the thumb drive.

The obligatory components have been actually ripe for choosing within the late Nineteen Nineties. Flash reminiscence turned low cost and sturdy sufficient for shopper use by 1995. The circulation of information through the World Wide Web, together with software program and music, was exploding, growing a requirement for moveable information storage.

When expertise pushes and customers pull, an invention can appear, looking back, virtually inevitable. And all the purported inventors may actually have give you the identical important machine independently. But 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 collection 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 dad and mom, working exhausting to make ends meet, frequently left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets.

The first in his household to attend highschool, Tan rapidly 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,” in response to a 2001 article within the Straits Times. After a caning for truancy in his third yr of highschool that served as a wake-up name, Tan settled all the way down to his research and accomplished his O-level exams. He entered the National 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. 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 Seventies, Singapore was house to manufacturing vegetation for Fairchild Semiconductor, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, and Texas Instruments, amongst others. These firms have been joined by the Japanese companies 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 clients.

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 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 various giant multinationals in Singapore.

Meanwhile, worldwide gross sales of laptop tools had began to growth. Although private computer systems and numerous moveable computer systems had been round because the late 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 resembling shows, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, exhausting 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 advised 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 essential hub for electronics manufacturing, together with exhausting drives and semiconductor wafers, and the island had a big and rising electronics ecosystem with design and manufacturing experience.

Toshiba provides Tan his large break

All this exercise, nonetheless, didn’t create a straightforward path for Tan. Many of his previous 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. But Tan persevered, and after two years, in 1998, he acquired 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 explicit, Toshiba needed an MP3 participant, a compact and moveable solid-state machine that would copy music recordsdata from a pc, to which it will 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, a lot of MP3 gamers of assorted 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 moveable radios and growth bins. 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,” in response to a 2005 article within the Straits Times. Tan thought that by leaving out the flexibility to play music, the machine would turn out to be extra versatile, in a position to deal with not simply MP3s but in addition textual content, spreadsheets, pictures—any form of laptop file. Many firms have been already promoting music gamers, however an affordable, USB-driven, versatile storage machine may need an excellent greater market, Tan suspected, and he may very well 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 outcome 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 in addition specifically designed firmware that allowed the solid-state storage to work together with a wide range of laptop working techniques.

But the thumb drive, with its flash reminiscence and USB interface, was hardly a totally 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 shopper product.

Local circumstances can 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 essential. Those similar components, nonetheless, additionally made the invention troublesome to manage. Once the concept 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 in 2000, a month earlier than the German tech truthful the place Trek launched the machine, however a pending patent did little to cease copycats.

In addition to claims by M-Systems and IBM, maybe probably the most difficult 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 shopper electronics have been produced as “shanzhai” items, exterior 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 acquire rights to fabricate and distribute the ensuing merchandise exterior of China. Despite this collaboration, Netac 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 turn out to be extra versatile.

Electronics pirates world wide then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them exhausting and generally received. Had Trek been a bigger firm with extra assets and extra patent expertise, the story may need had a unique ending. As it was, although, Trek’s patents stood on comparatively weak floor. Beginning in 2002, Tan introduced swimsuit in Singapore in opposition to a handful of firms (together with Electec, FE Global Electronics, M-Systems, and Ritronics Components) for patent infringement. After a number of years of court docket battles and a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} in authorized charges, Trek received that case, persuading the decide that its ThumbDrive was the primary machine ever designed to be plugged immediately into a pc with out the necessity for a cable. An appeals court docket within the United Kingdom, nonetheless, 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 in opposition to 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 advised 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 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 information 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 extensively taken up as a stand-alone machine, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it appropriate for shopper electronics units 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 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 ample to maintain it worthwhile. But 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 & 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 recordsdata 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 machine for carrying information in our pockets.

They are 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 are 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 information too delicate to ship over the Internet.

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 response to 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 easy.

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. But full credit score for the thumb drive actually belongs extra to the setting—the concepts circulating on the time and the networks of shoppers and suppliers—than any particular person.

Moreover, 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. Determined to take ethical and monetary credit score for the thumb drive, Tan went to extraordinary lengths—even breaking the legislation—with a view to make his firm and himself a hit. The thumb drive exhibits how difficult tales of invention typically are.

This article seems within the February 2023 print subject.