Katy
The first USB flash drive in the world was invented in the late nineties of the last century by three Israeli scientists: Oran Ogden, Amir Banom and Dov Moran. The release of the gadget took place as early as next 2000 by the joint efforts of the companies M-Systems and IBM.
DiskOnKey or Thumb drive
Mass distribution of flash drives was preceded by a trial between M-Systems and Trek Technology. As it turned out, the companies were simultaneously engaged in the development of a new drive. They presented their offspring in 2000 with a difference of six months, naming them DiskOnKey and thumb drive, respectively.
M-Systems, together with IBM, presented their development in early autumn in the United States of America. While developers from Singapore managed to make a presentation back in February that took place in Germany. However, all the courts, except for Singapore court, took the side of the Israeli company. Since the court received a patent for a flash drive from an Israeli company that was done back in 1999.
The history of the USB-stick
With the advent of the first computers, scientists have puzzled the development of portable memory drives that would not depend on energy consumption. So punch cards, floppy disks and optical, magnetic and laser disks were invented. But they all had significant shortcomings, starting with a small amount of stored information and ending with the need to use special devices for reading them.
Scientific research led to the creation of the first flash drive in 1984. The author was a Japanese Fujio Masuoka, who worked at Toshiba. Strangely enough, the prospects simply did not succeed in assessing the possibilities, so work on the project was stopped.
Intel presented the next flash drive in the early nineties of the last century. But her product was not widely spread due to its large size and very high price.
Interesting facts about flash drives
Modern USB flash drives are compact, affordable prices and have a large memory. The history of their creation and evolution is replete with many interesting, but at the same time little-known events:
- The first to appreciate all the advantages of flash drives were the representatives of the US Air Force and used them in fighters.
- Fujio Masuoka’s prize for the invention of flash memory was only a few hundred dollars.
- the name “flash” was invented by a colleague, Masuoka, by analogy with the English word “flash” since data is erased in a similar way on the drive.
- Amir Banom is also the developer of the most advanced computer programs for the game of chess.
- the flash cell size is only 24 nanometers; for comparison, the thickness of a hair is 40,000 nanometers.
USB flash drives at the dawn of mass production cost from $ 50 and had a maximum memory of only 8 megabytes. Work on the improvement of USB-flash memory devices does not stop to this day. Video about making a flash drive you can watch down below:
Every day that I come here I learn something new.
Interesting to read and watch the video about technology.
It was interesting learning how the flash disk came into being.
That was very interesting to read. I remember floppy discs. How technology has changed, for the better!
When I was teaching computer application using floppy disks way back in the 90s I told my students that one day the storage devices will be as small as their earrings. It happened. LOL