USB memories are part of our daily life, even though we use almost all the clouds, the USB 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 what memory he had?
The first prototype is credited to Israeli Dov Moran who started thinking and designing this in 1995, although it wasn’t until 1999 that 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, it was not he who commercialized 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 it was released, the two companies that brought it to market already did so with the current design.
This first Trek Technology USB key had a 8MB capacity and its price was 30 dollars. Immediately after, IBM released its own, one like its competitor and another to cope with 32MB, although its cost had risen to $100.
It is true that their capacity was not the most impressive of the moment, but their ease of transport made them take off in a few 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 CDs, much more fragile and larger than a simple flash drive that you could carry around in your pants. In addition to the fact that both had a much higher risk of data loss due to magnetic interference or scratches in the case of the disc.
One of its advantages was also its price, it wasn’t so high if we compared to a CD that, with the exception of rewritable CDs, you couldn’t use it more than once, thus greatly limiting jobs where you had to be transferring from constant physical data. $30 for unlimited, secure, reusable 8MB storage was a pretty good deal at the time.
From that moment many companies bet on what they saw as the future, and today we already have several designs and capacities of up to 1TB or more in a small USB memory. It must be said that 23 years have passed since the launch of the first, so we can say that the invention was a triumph.
Technology does not stop evolving and we do not know how far it will go, time passes very quickly, but so does the evolution of it. Twenty-five years ago we used 1.44MB floppy disks, now we have flash drives nearly 1,000 times larger. Can you imagine in a few years there will be another device with the capacity of 1,000 1TB USB drives? I still don’t have one with this ability.
