IEEE Spectrum has an article about the USB thumb drive and its inventor, Trek's CEO, Henn Tann in Singapore. The market for USB thumb drives has passed $7 billion as of last year and is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2028.
But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek.
Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.
USB thumb drives do certainly seem to be everywhere still and have even been a reasonably reliable way to jump into or out of air gapped networks. Examples of that include Stuxnet and the Snowden files, the former destroying hidden equipment in an illegal nuclear weapons programme and the latter exposing a pervasive, illegal surveillance programme. At many small and medium sized businesses, USB thumb drive-based sneakernet stayed alive and well for many a year out of necessity since Netware was wiped out without ever getting viable alternative for in house hosting.
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Hardware designer and manufacturer, SparkFun, has a short biography about computer engineer Ajay Bhatt who is widely recognized as one of the key inventors of the Universal Serial Bus (USB).
Once the design was finalized, Bhatt and his team worked with other technology companies to promote and standardize the USB. They formed a working group called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to develop the USB specification, which was first introduced in 1996.
The USB specification quickly gained widespread adoption in the technology industry due to its convenience and versatility, and new versions of the standard were introduced over the years to improve data transfer speeds, power management, and other features. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, and it continues to evolve and improve with each new iteration.
When Intel initially developed the USB, it held the patents for the technology, which allowed the company to control the standard and charge licensing fees for its use. However, Intel soon realized that its proprietary approach was not in the best interests of the industry or consumers. The company recognized that the success of the USB depended on its widespread adoption and interoperability with different devices, which would not be possible if licensing fees were required for every use.
In response, Intel took a bold step and transferred ownership of the USB specifications to a non-profit organization called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). The USB-IF is a group of companies that work together to promote and develop the USB standard, with the goal of ensuring that the standard remains open and accessible to all.
Intel's decision to transfer ownership of the USB specifications to the USB-IF was a pivotal moment in the development of the USB standard. It helped to ensure that the USB became a truly universal and open interface, which has had a profound impact on the computer industry and consumers around the world. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, from computers and smartphones to home appliances and automotive systems, and it continues to evolve and improve to meet the needs of an ever-changing technological landscape.
Previously:
(2022) Henn Tan and the Invention of the USB Thumb Drive in Singapore
(2022) Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vali.magni on Friday December 16, @03:20AM (1 child)
Henn Tan was convicted and jailed 16 months for accounting fraud. AFAIK he is still in jail.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/trek-2000-founder-sentenced-16-months-jail-offences-including-cooking-books [businesstimes.com.sg]
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/thumb-drive-inventor-and-trek-2000-founder-henn-tan-jailed-for-accounting-fraud [straitstimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @03:56AM
#FreeThumbDriveMan
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday December 16, @04:22AM (5 children)
When USB 1.1 was revised in '98 to allow extension cables and up the transfer rates, M-Systems, which was selling their patented proprietary storage chips under the "DiskOnChip" brand since '95 ( http://www.os2museum.com/wp/diskonchip/ [os2museum.com] ), realized the density and cost worked out well enough for a standalone device. So, they patented the "DiskOnKey" form factor and were granted the rights around '99. At around the same time, an IBM engineer that was doing DiskOnChip OS/2 drivers (see link above) had a similar idea which he also registered.
Conversely, Trek 2000 came around to the notion through the other end: They were doing white label flash mp3 players at the time and their line engineers realized if they strip everything off and leave out just the pure storage, the BoM would workout.
Anyhow, decades of litigation later, M-System (SanDisk bought them by then) was awarded the patents and Trek got the trademark for Thumbdrive. Regardless, the attitude in the industry between people who actually have a clue generally favored M-Systems while treating Trek as something of a patent troll. However, to be fair, on its own, the "innovation" of thumbdrives/diskonkeys is so trivial as a natural progression of storage density and connectivity buses that neither is should really be credited for this. Still, M-Systems was actually doing R&D on the storage chips themselves while Trek was printing PCBs and putting together packaging so between the two...
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(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday December 16, @06:45AM (2 children)
Yes, his arrest for fraudulent accounting was mentioned in the article,
His company had patents on the invention, but it was too small to have any respect and according to the article most competitors just ignored them knowing the company did not have the resources to take on many lawsuits. Those few lawsuits which he did bring dragged on and on as the market came and went. In short patents only help if the company they are assigned to is sufficiently big to appear as a legal threat to everyone.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday December 16, @03:04PM (1 child)
I wouldn't go so far as to mention the fraud thing since it might give the impression Trek stole the innovation despite them being first to market and the sheer obviousness of the form factor. That is, I genuinely believe Trek came up with it on their own. I mean, just a year prior to USB 1.1 in '97, Audible MobilePlayer was released with a 4MB EEPROM running a dock off a serial cable at $200: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veSsIDmyQyc [youtube.com]
So, if you take that early device and naturally replace the old connector with the new USB (to get rid of the hub) and upgrade the storage for something newer, you get a fairly modern mp3 player where the AA battery becomes the biggest component and the BoM for thumbdrives / diskonkey just pops out of the spreadsheet.
It's similar to the whole LG's Prada vs. iPhone vs. HTC Touch thing: The Prada was released 3 month before the iPhone (late 2006 vs. early 2007) and had all the right hardware and similarly capable software. However, since Apple was first to the American market and released a software SDK a year and a half later (mid-2008), popular history was "revised" to credit them as the first modern smartphones. However, if you go by the "can it load apps?" definition to distinguish feature phones from smartphones, the HTC Touch had Windows running Explorer and downloading .exe mid-'07 so it still takes the lead over the iPhone.
Funny enough, a similar 3 month margin was met by Android 1.0 following Apple's first SDK release. So, when you put it all together, you get that "writing on the wall" type thing where everyone in industry who ever seen a Star Trek Next Gen episode or ever heard about the IBM Simon / saw a glance of a PDA already understood what was coming so you'd be hard pressed to single out "innovation" in this whole affair.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 16, @11:27PM
Yeah. If not for that absolutely abysmal state of the patent industry at the time (scary to think that the current state is actually an improvement) I'd be surprised that anyone was able to get patents for something so obvious.
USB drives were already a thing - admittedly a bit slow, but much faster that floppy disks, which were still the go-to method of transferring files that weren't worth involving an expensive CD-R system. And as flash storage reached useful capacities and price points it was an obvious combination.
I suppose the form factor was maybe a little innovative, but given the size of the flash chips and low and rapidly falling price of USB client chips it was a pretty obvious move to make a tightly integrated device rather than some sort of cable-connected separate flash-based "disk" system using some new proprietary "disk" interface that would need lots of time and buy in to create a large market - like the Iomega and SuperDisk systems were still struggling to do almost half a decade after their release - great devices at home, or in an office where the drives had been widely adopted, but largely useless otherwise since hardly anyone had compatible drives.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Friday December 16, @05:14PM (1 child)
I haven't even thought about the Disk on Chip for a while. The interesting thing about it is that it was arranged as a storage with 2 block buffers presented as memory suitable for execute in place. In the early days of LinuxBIOS, that was actually used as a BIOS replacement. You could get enough initialization into the first block/page to enable a sort of interleaved bank switching which gave you enough room to get the memory initialized, then you could copy out a Linux kernel and initrd out and boot Linux.
It was an interesting project getting that going on a SiS 630 chipset ATX board.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday December 16, @06:23PM
I believe the modern high capacity EEPROMs use similar switching to execute more stuff directly off the same amount of pins without going through the RAM.
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(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Friday December 16, @04:19PM (2 children)
every so often, I come across my old stack of cdrom readers, writers, dvd drives, etc. no BD, thank deity, but quite a few 'good' plextor drives (some scsi, some ide, some sata). they were really good in their day and worth having over the cheap plastic and tin ones that came toward the 'end' of the format.
is there any reason to keep any of them? I guess one reader and if its a r/w, even better. not sure there's ever a reason to have a writer or blanks around. is there? I have a few stacks of old blanks, including the lightscribe ones that were fun but not easy to deal with, sw wise.
I think the last time I wrote a disc was 7 or more years ago. if its more than 5, then should I even keep those drives around, taking up space? no way to sell them, not worth the trouble, no one wants them. shame, but storage space is costly and those dont justify their space, *at all*.
correct me if I'm missing something. but bootable usb drives do the same as the old bootable joliet stuff, the only exception is that opto is truly write-only and you can trust that, when running direct from it or accessing files from it. scsi used to have rw jumpers, too, but sata and ide never had that. (I miss having a last-chance hw switch to turn things off. oh well.)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday December 16, @04:33PM
I don't really see a use for them anymore. They're interesting but not very useful. The re-writeable discs are fragile.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 16, @11:41PM
Yeah, those old drives were built like tanks. I think I only ever bought two CD-R drives in my life. The first was a 2x speed Creative branded drive that cost me like $250 way back when that was real money. Then years later as speeds were plateauing I bought a much faster drive with CD-RW support for a fraction of the price. I've just moved them between PC's whenever I upgraded, and they've never given me any trouble. I'll probably have to buy a third eventually, what with the IDE bus being phased out.
I do use still them occasionally, but mostly for tech support stuff (where the trustworthiness when working on strange computers is a huge plus) or sending large files to friends and clients.