The History of Custom USB Flash Drives

Although many companies purport to have created the first USB flash drives, there is much dispute over who first came up with the idea and who first implemented it in the product we know as custom USB drives today.

Of the invention of flash memory technology in general, however, there appears to be no contest. The creator of both NAND and NOR flash memory was Toshiba’s Fujio Masuoka in 1984. Masuoka’s colleague, Shoji Ariizumi, was credited with coming up with the name “flash” because of how the way that memory storage is erased using the technology reminded him of a camera’s flash.

The first commercial NOR flash chip was created by Intel in 1988 after representatives of the company saw Masuoka’s presentation of his invention in San Francisco, California at the 1984 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM). The NOR-type chip, however, was marked by long, slow write and erase times, though it worked tremendously well as a replacement for old ROM chips.

Toshiba, meanwhile, came out with the first NAND flash chip, revealing it at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in 1989. These NAND-type flash memory chips had much faster write and erase times, and were therefore, predictably, more expensive than their NOR counterparts.

The first NAND-based flash memory card was launched by Toshiba subsidiary SmartMedia in 1995, going on to compete with fast competitors, PC card, MiniCard, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, CompactFlash, xD-Picture Card, and Memory Stick.

In 2000, a company named Trek Technology was the first company to sell custom USB flash drives (called at that time: thumbdrives), but a glance at the company’s patent reveals a more general family of external storage devices described, and not custom USB drives in particular.

Back in 1998, Dov Moran, working for M-Systems of Israel (a company that, in 2006, was bought out by SanDisk) was working on developing the first custom USB flash drives. M-Systems even went so far as to buy and launch the domain DiskOnKey.com, promoting the device the company promised to soon perfect and release.

With help from design consultancy Ziba and the addition in 2000 of Dan Harkabi to the M-Systems team, a patent specifically describing custom USB drives was filed. The first patent to describe custom USB flash drives and only custom USB flash drives, however, was filed by IBM inventor Shimon Shmueli in September of 1999. And, as further research reveals, the M-Systems DiskOnKey was actually built for IBM.

While Trek Technology may have sold the first custom USB drives in early 2000, IBM, releasing its 8 MB “USB Memory Key” in late 2000, was the first to sell such a product in America, the initial result: a 2001 IDEA Award.

Understandably, the patent ownership for custom USB flash drives as well as the invention and release of the first actual custom USB drives is still heavily under dispute even today.