The USB flash drive feels like the most obvious invention in computing. Its messy origin story says otherwise

Published Oct 13, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT Aggy is a veteran writer and editor in the technology and gaming space. Having served as a Managing Editor for high-traffic digital publications, alongside being an editor and consultant for over a dozen sites. Aggy's published work spans a wide and respected array of tech and gaming outlets, including WePC, Screen Rant, How-To Geek, Android Police, PC Invasion, and Try Hard Guides. Beyond editorial work, Aggy's direct experience in the tech sphere extends to app development. Aggy has published two games under Tales and is always eager to learn and do more. He also likes working on computers and researching in his spare time. He knows about Windows, Linux, Audio, Video, and much more. It is easy to look at a small plastic drive on a desk and assume someone sat down, drew a blueprint, and built it out of thin air. Plenty of devices were genius inventions that one person could lay claim to, sometimes building off the foundation of others. However, hardware history rarely works like that, and combining parts from separate inventions usually turns into a brawl over who crossed the finish line first. The USB flash drive is no different. The tech pieces had to line up first Older parts came together to push out the floppy disk Way before any USB flash drive showed up on store shelves, the key tech you'd need to build one was already getting used all over the computer world. By the late 1990s, putting these parts together into a thumb-sized storage gadget was just the next logical step. It didn't come out of nowhere. If you look at how the dominoes fell, it was bound to happen eventually. The solid-state base was laid down at Toshiba Corporation back in the 1980s under Dr. Fujio Masuoka. In 1980, Masuoka had the idea of non-volatile floating-gate semiconductor memory, which Toshiba showed off at the 1984 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting as NOR flash memory. NOR flash let you do byte-level random access, so it was awesome for running system firmware, but its design needed individual contact vias for every memory cell, which jacked up manufacturing costs and gave you lousy storage density. To dodge these physical roadblocks, Masuoka and his crew rolled out the NAND flash architecture at the 1987 IEDM. By stringing floating-gate MOSFET cells together in series instead of parallel arrays, NAND flash got rid of most of those direct contact vias. That shrank each cell to about 60% of the space a NOR cell took up. To make NAND flash into a solid mass storage medium, Toshiba engineers Riichiro Shirota and Koji Sakui tweaked the programming mechanics in the late 80s. In 1991, Toshiba released the first commercial four-megabit NAND flash chip. Around the same time, the USB standard was emerging, with Intel engineer Ajay Bhatt playing a major role in its development before it officially launched in 1996. USB 1.0 brought a couple of features that turned out to be huge. One of the big ones was hot-plugging, which let users hook up or yank devices without rebooting. Another was five-volt power sent right through the cable, so you didn't need external batteries or power bricks. The USB Implementers Forum also set up the USB Mass Storage Class protocol, using the Bulk-Only Transport profile. This standardized software interface lets host operating systems spot and manage external block storage without needing custom drivers. This combination pretty much killed the floppy disk. By the late 1990s, floppies still held only 1.44 megabytes, broke down often due to magnetic media degradation, and required bulky, dedicated drive bays inside computers. I spent a lot of my childhood and early teens using floppy disks; I miss them. However, USBs are far better; they just don't feel the same. Different groups tried to make the hardware Companies across the globe filed claims at the same time Figuring out who invented the USB flash drive is incredibly messy because it feels like it happened all at once in different places. Between 1998 and 2001, patent filings, internal memos, product launches, and factory milestones piled up across several continents. Because different parties hit different milestones, figuring out who deserves credit depends a lot on what you're making and where. In April 1999, Israeli storage firm M-Systems, led by Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan, filed a patent application in the United States. That gave them the first formal legal claim. Their filing described a PC flash disk using a USB interface, non-volatile flash memory, and a custom controller ASIC. In September 1999, IBM engineer Shimon Shmueli wrote up an internal idea at IBM for a USB flash drive that could replace the floppy drive in ThinkPad laptops. His write-up described a removable solid-state memory module with a built-in USB connector, but IBM never got a patent on the core design. M-Systems started selling it as the DiskOnKey in late 2000 and made a deal with IBM, which sold the same hardware worldwide as the IBM USB Memory Key. Months after M-Systems' U.S. filing, Chinese engineers Deng Guoshun and Cheng Xiaohua of Netac Technology filed a patent application in China for an electronic flash memory external storage method and device. Netac's patent was granted in China in 2002, and U.S. patents came later. Those patents became the legal backbone for its product, the OnlyDisk. Singapore-based Trek 2000 International, led by CEO Henn Tan, was the first to show one off in public and get it into stores. After filing a priority patent in Singapore in February 2000, Trek publicly launched its ThumbDrive at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, and it hit stores soon after. Then in November 2000, Malaysian engineer Pua Khein-Seng co-founded Phison Electronics Corporation in Taiwan. In 2001, Phison pulled off a big win by designing the first single-chip USB flash drive controller. Phison's System-on-a-Chip puts the USB physical layer transceiver, memory management unit, and flash controller all on a single piece of silicon. That brought costs way down and made it possible to crank these out all over the world. This is all really hard to keep up with and has caused so many issues. The legal record will never give us one clear winner Local patent laws split the credit across different borders Unfortunately, all these things happened at around the same time, and we don't know at what point it truly became the USB flash drive. None of them started as the USB drive we know today, which is why there are so many disagreements. The thing is, all of these pieces ended up in the USB drive, so the waters are really muddy. There's no one inventor everyone agrees on, because courts and patent offices in different countries use different rules for the same timeline. Patents only count in the country that grants them, so who gets credit changes depending on where you live. It doesn't matter who did it; it matters that technology moved forward Looking for one person to pin a medal on usually misses how manufacturing works. There's no tidy story with one hero here, and the legal records are still a mess today. Honestly, how these things made it onto store shelves is the more interesting part. Somebody had to get them out the door while everyone else argued over who thought of it first.