USB memories are part of our day to day, although practically all of us use the clouds, the flash drive is still the most convenient way to transport data from one place to another without the need for the Internet. But, why didn’t you know which was the first in history and how much memory it had?
The first prototype is attributed to the Israeli Dov Moran who began to think and design this in 1995, although it was not until 1999 when he worked at M-Systems when he filed the first patent called “USB-based PC flash disk”.
How was it?
Although this Israeli presented the patent and the general idea, he was not the one who marketed it, but the companies Trek Technology and IBM who launched it on the market in the year 2000.
The prototype of Dov Moran and his two partners had a cable that went to the computer, as if it were an external hard drive, not directly as you have in mind right now. However, when marketing it, the two companies that brought it to the market already did so with the current design.
That first Trek Technology brand pendrive had a capacity of 8 MB and its price was 30 dollars. Immediately afterwards, IBM released its own, one just like its competitor’s and another to cope with it with 32 MB, although its cost rose to $100.
It is true that their capacity was not the most impressive of the moment, but their easy transport made them take off in a matter of weeks. To date, the best thing you had was a floppy disk, much larger and with a memory of only 1.44 MB, as well as the CDs, much more fragile and larger than a simple flash drive that you could carry in a pair of pants. In addition to the fact that both ones and the others had much more risk of data loss due to magnetic interference or scratches in the case of the disk.
One of its advantages was also its price, it was not so high if we have compared to a CD that, except for rewritable ones, you could not use it more than once, thus greatly limiting the jobs where you needed to be in constant physical data transfer. $30 for unlimited, secure, reusable 8MB storage was a pretty good deal in its day.
From that moment, many companies bet on what they saw as the future, and today we already have multiple designs and capacities of up to 1 TB or more inside a small USB memory. It must be said that 23 years have passed since the first was launched, so we could say that the invention has been a triumph.
Technology does not stop evolving and we do not know how far it will go, time goes by very quickly, but so does the evolution of this. Twenty-five years ago we used 1.44 MB floppy disks, now we have flash drives nearly 1,000 times that size. Can you imagine in a few years that there is another device that has the capacity of 1,000 1TB pen drives? I still don’t have a single one with that capacity.
