History and Mystery of the USB Flash Drive

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The USB Flash Drive

The history of the USB Flash Drive is a hazy for a multitude of reasons. This is often due to how it is an amalgamation and combination of many different technologies. When researching its relevance I discovered this, as many different websites I stumbled up added more mystery than history. In order to truly discover how the flash drive was truly assembled one must look at its blueprints, and then follow it slowly into its evolution. The timeline of the flash drive as you will soon see is one which is plagued with a multitude of ups and downs especially when it comes to the claims and the rights of who flash drive ownership belongs too.

The Timeline

Zip Disk

     *click picture for link*

The USB Flash Drive began as simply the zip disk or disk drive as a small cartridge which stores about 1.44 megabytes. They were often characterized as hard to transport, and abnormally floppy. they were limited in popularity as many people wished to store larger programs and these programs barley were able to fit on one if not two different disk. In fact, they often needed multiple disk to store large amounts of data. This would slowly but surely kill the request for the zip disk overtime. The Zip Disk were allegedly priced around 200$ 

USB 1.0

The first attempt at a USB was more of an attempt at data transference than it was an attempt at a portable data source. The truth of the matter is that this was often used to link many PC's together and link data rather than transfer it all together instead of portably. This was what I would say is the beginning of data storage and transference as both items, the Zip Disk and USB would be required to create the full powered Flash Drive.

The First Generation Flash Drive

Overtime, technologies began to advance and become one, and eventually became the first modern day interpretation of a Flash Drive. The Flash Drive, known at the time under the working project name the "Thumb Drive", was released commercially in 2000 by a Singapore Company known as Trek Technology. The Drive was critically acclaimed as a convenient way to pass and transfer mass points of data.