Who invented the thumb drive?
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Who invented the thumb drive?
1–10 of 190 posts
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#2Oh shit, another myth goes down the drain. As someone who grew up in Israel I was always proud of M Systems and Dov Moran as the inventors of the Thumb Drive and creating something nobody thought of before.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#3> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028.
More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.
Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#4The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made them appear magic.
People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at the time.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#5Someone not smart enough to understand that most people want to write on it with a pen, so it should contain a large flat, bright-colored surface.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#6Oh shit, another myth goes down the drain. As someone who grew up in Israel I was always proud of M Systems and Dov Moran as the inventors of the Thumb Drive and creating something nobody thought of before.
[deleted]
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#7Oh shit, another myth goes down the drain. As someone who grew up in Israel I was always proud of M Systems and Dov Moran as the inventors of the Thumb Drive and creating something nobody thought of before.
The myth lives on. According to Wikipedia:
> Multiple individuals have staked a claim to being the inventor of the USB flash drive. On April 5, 1999, Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems, an Israeli company, filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk".
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#8I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#9> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028. More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds. Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the price…
> Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g. Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress support on their recent models of higher priced camera systems). Prices are very high, but that's justifiable IMO - unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up with the performance and endurance that professional equipment demands.
[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicursam...
[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicmulti...
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#10I guess this was one of those "inventions" which are pretty obvious in hindsight, and I bet more than one party had already though of building a USB drive, it was just a question of the USB interface becoming widespread enough and of flash memory becoming affordable and reliable enough. Actually, flash memory cards with proprietary interfaces were available for some time before the year 2000 given in the article (Compact Flash since 1994, Sony's Memory Stick since 1998), so it was just the question of using USB instead of these interfaces.