Some good ideas have many parents, including that of the USB stick. In the year 2000 both IBM and the Singaporean company Trek 2000 Internationally first USB-connected flash memory sticks on the market. Those from IBM were called DiskOnKey and used technology from the Israeli company M-Systems. Trek 2000, on the other hand, coined the term ThumbDrive (thumb drive), which is common in the English-speaking world. Before that, IBM had published a “Patent Disclosure” of the then employee Shimon Shmueli on USB sticks in 1999.

Whoever the actual inventor is: End of the 1990 The most important ingredients for USB sticks were available. On the one hand there were already flash storage media such as CompactFlash (CF) as well as the now forgotten SmartMedia Cards and PC Cards. They were used, for example, in the then brand-new digicams. On the other hand, Intel 1996 had the PC mainboard chipset 440 FX introduced with Universal Serial Bus (USB).

In the late 1990 he Years ago, the idea of ​​developing a portable storage medium with a USB connection so that it would work on any PC without a reader or adapter could well have come up. Those who 1998 needed removable storage for data exchange or for backups, often still handled floppy disks. There were also ZIP and Jaz drives, magneto-optical (MO) disks and recordable CDs and DVDs. None of the named removable media could be connected directly to any PC, rather they require suitable drives or readers.

A USB stick consists of a few components, in Essentially consisting of the actual NAND flash memory chip (far left) and a controller (middle) including firmware that manages the data, corrects errors and provides a USB connection.

Managed Flash plus USB The 1989 M-Systems founded by Dov Moran after studying at Technion Haifa in Israel had experience with flash storage media. 1995 the DiskOnChip was released, a compact flash storage medium for soldering onto embedded systems.

In contrast to mere NAND or NOR flash chips, the host system did not have to worry about error correction or wear leveling with a DiskOnChip: DiskOnChip is so-called “Managed Flash” with an additional controller and firmware. This allows the operating system to integrate the DiskOnChip in a similar way to a hard disk or floppy disk. M-Systems also developed the TrueFFS file system, which alleviates some of the disadvantages of flash memory.

Driver deficiency The step from DiskOnChip to DiskOnKey was then no longer great: In a certain way It is a DiskOnChip with a USB controller (and USB power supply) in a compact housing. But that in and of itself did not initially produce the desired all-purpose removable storage device that works right away on any PC with USB. Because USB was not ubiquitous at the time: older computers first had to be retrofitted with a PCI card as a USB host adapter or a PC card with notebooks Operating systems like Windows 98 and Windows NT could not do anything with a USB stick. First of all, the standard driver for USB mass storage devices (USB mass storage devices) built into practically every operating system had to be invented. It was only built into Windows ME and Windows 2000; OS / 2 made slow progress, and Linux also took a while. Until then, before the happy file exchange via USB, the installation of the