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[72]Learn more -> [73]CREATE AN ACCOUNT[74]SIGN IN [75]JOIN IEEE[76]SIGN IN [77]Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, [78]join IEEE as a paying member. [79]CREATE AN ACCOUNT[80]SIGN IN [81]History of Technology[82]Topic[83]Type[84]Guest Article [85]How PostScript Kickstarted Desktop Publishing Adobe's PostScript became the heart of the digital printing press [86]David C. Brock 08 Dec 2022 8 min read An illustration consisting of a spiral of calligraphy-style lettering that repeatedly spells the word "infinity". "Infinity Circle," by Xerox PARC researcher Scott Kim, was made using JaM, predecessor to PostScript. Adobe [87]postscript[88]Adobe[89]pdf[90]Xerox Parc The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs. The [91]Computer History Museum is excited to publicly release, for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. (Register to download the code [92]here.) We thank Adobe for the company's permission and support, and Adobe cofounder John Warnock for championing this release. The Big Picture of Printing Printing has always been a technology with profound cultural consequences. Movable type first emerged in East Asia. Later, in 15th-century Europe, the printing press evolved from technology from wine and oil presses combined with novel practices to mass-produce type using metal casting. With the printing press came a revolution in human literacy. Books became cheaper and quicker to produce, and as a result appeared in ever greater numbers. Literacy and libraries expanded. Greater access to information transformed learning, research, government, commerce, and the arts. A black and white photo of two smiling, bearded white men sitting at a conference room John Warnock [left] and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems in December 1982.Adobe and Doug Menuez From the start of Adobe Systems (now Adobe) 40 years ago, in December 1982, the firm's cofounders envisioned a new kind of printing press--one that was fundamentally digital, using the latest advances in computing. Initial discussions by cofounders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock with computer makers such as Digital Equipment Corp. and Apple convinced them that software was the key to the new digital printing press. Their vision: Any computer could connect with printers and typesetters via a common language to print words and images at the highest fidelity. Led by Warnock, Adobe assembled a team of skillful and creative programmers to create this new language. In addition to the two cofounders, the team included Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. The language they created was a complete programming language, named PostScript, and was released by Adobe in 1984. In this video, Geschke discusses how Adobe came to focus on PostScript: Chuck Geschke discusses how Adobe came to focus on PostScript as their initial business[93]Computer History Museum By treating everything to be printed the same, in a common mathematical description, PostScript granted abilities offered nowhere else. Text and images could be scaled, rotated, and moved at will, as in the opening image to this essay. Adobe licensed PostScript to computer and printer manufacturers, and the business jumped into a period of hypergrowth. There was tremendous demand for the new software printing press. Computer makers from the established worlds of minicomputers and workstations to the rapidly growing world of personal computers adopted the technology. Printer makers joined in, from those selling well-established printers to the new laser printers and professional typesetters. Software makers rushed to make their offerings compatible with PostScript. Fueling this growth were advances Adobe was making around a critical need: providing professional-quality digital typefaces--and the many fonts that comprise them--for use within PostScript. Adobe developed a fresh approach to describing typefaces geometrically, and the company licensed many of the most well-known typefaces, including those for Asian languages. PostScript and the Adobe Type Library revolutionized printing and publishing, and kickstarted the explosive growth of desktop publishing starting in the 1980s. PostScript became so successful that it grew into a de facto standard internationally, with Adobe publishing the details of the PostScript language and allowing others to create products that were PostScript-compatible. Today, most printers rely on PostScript technology either directly or through a technology that grew out of it: PDF, or Portable Document Format. Samples of a typeface called Trajan. Trajan was an early typeface created by Adobe using its new technologies.Adobe Warnock championed the development of PDF in the 1990s, transforming PostScript into a technology that was safer and easier to use for digital documents, but retaining all the benefits of interoperability, fidelity, and quality. Over the decades, Adobe continued to enhance PDF's features, making it a crucial standard for creating digital documents, printing them, and displaying graphics of all kinds on screens from desktops to laptops to smartphones and smartwatches. Today, the digital printing press has far exceeded anything envisioned by the Adobe cofounders when they first set out to create PostScript with their team. Almost everything printed on paper is done so using computers. Indeed, in many areas of the world, computers have become the overwhelming tool for writing. As Doug Brotz puts it, PostScript "democratized the print world." With PDF now so successful that it too has become a global standard, the number of PDFs created each year measures in the trillions. PostScript's Graphical Roots Typography is the combination of art and technique that is concerned with the display of writing, especially as printed. It is concerned with the shape and placement of characters, words, paragraphs, and so on. In this, typography is thoroughly graphical, a matter of visual design. Digital typography is no different, just focused to computer techniques and displays. It is fitting, then, that the roots of PostScript and its contributions to the development of digital typography lie in advanced computer graphics. Warnock, the architect for PostScript, launched his computing career as a graduate student at the University of Utah at the close of the 1960s. Utah was then one of the world's foremost centers for advanced computer graphics research. In his work there and then at a computer graphics firm run by Utah's lead professors, David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, Warnock embraced their characteristic geometric approach to computer graphics. Shapes, scenes, images, and animations were created and designed using mathematics to describe the geometry of the visual and using various computer procedures to realize these descriptions as imagery. In particular, Warnock was impressed with the power of a procedural computer language, called the Design System, that he and John Gaffney helped to develop at Evans and Sutherland's firm. In 1978, Chuck Geschke had just set up the Imaging Science Laboratory within the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Geschke hired Warnock to take up a pressing challenge for the lab. PARC was creating a set of experimental computers that had new kinds of displays and that were intended to be used with an array of novel printers--as PARC had recently invented the laser printer. Warnock's challenge was to create a device-independent graphics system that could be used across any computer, display, or printer. Warnock saw that something like the Design System could work in this new computing environment, but refocused from 3D graphics to PARC's concern with professional-quality printing and high-quality display of text and images. The result was another geometrical, procedural language called JaM, which Warnock created in partnership with PARC researcher Martin Newell. (The illustration at top was created using JaM.) From 1979 into 1981, JaM became a major component in a new effort in Geschke's laboratory. This was a push to develop a commercial printing language that could be used with the production version of PARC's experimental computers called the Xerox Star, and more broadly used across all of Xerox's lines of printers. A group of six researchers--Geschke, Butler Lampson, Jerry Mendelson, Brian Reid, Bob Sproull, and Warnock--melded the JaM approach with other, more established protocol techniques. The result was named Interpress. Xerox leadership was quickly convinced of the potential for Interpress, deciding that it would indeed be developed into the firm's printing standard. However, moving to this standard would take several years, during which time Interpress would be under wraps. This delay spurred Geschke and Warnock to move. They would leave PARC and found a startup in which they would create a rival to Interpress, but built more fully along the geometric, procedural language approach that Warnock found to be so powerful. For the new startup to create this new language, PostScript, as the digital printing press, it would require a brilliant team. In this video clip, Geschke discusses the motivations behind the formation of Adobe: Chuck Geschke discusses the motivations behind the formation of Adobe[94]Computer History Museum In this video clip, Warnock discusses key early actions in establishing Adobe. John Warnock discusses key early actions in establishing Adobe[95]Computer History Museum The Team that Created PostScript In December 1982, when Geschke and Warnock founded Adobe Systems, the new printing language they intended to create was at the very center of their plans, hopes, and vision. The future of the firm hinged on PostScript. Geschke and Warnock were themselves both highly experienced software creators. Geschke had earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University working on advanced compilers and had been a leader in the creation of an important programming language developed and used at PARC called Mesa. As discussed, Warnock had a Ph.D. in computer graphics software from the University of Utah and years of experience creating languages exactly like their envisioned PostScript. But perhaps because of their extensive background in creating cutting-edge software, the cofounders knew they needed to expand their team to create PostScript. A black and white photo of a group of 20 people posing on the deck of a large sailboat. Early Adobe employees and friends sail in the San Francisco Bay on a company outing.Adobe Adobe's PostScript team quickly took shape as three other highly talented software creators from PARC decided to join with Geschke and Warnock: Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton, and Ed Taft. Brotz had earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford before joining PARC in 1977. Paxton also had a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford and joined PARC the same year as Brotz. Taft had joined PARC earlier, hired by Geschke right after finishing his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1973. Together, and with input from Adobe colleagues like Andy Shore, the team created PostScript by the close of 1984. A Trade Secret in the Source Code Adobe's commitment to a geometrical approach for PostScript carried consequences for how it would contend with typefaces--distinctive character shapes--and the numerous fonts that actually realize these typefaces at different sizes and styles (point sizes, regular, italic, bold, and so on). At PARC, fonts had been created as a set of individual hand-crafted bitmap images, with static definitions of which bits were on and which were off for each character of the font. Meanwhile, though, researchers at PARC and beyond were exploring ways to define character shapes mathematically. At Adobe, the team followed this mathematical description approach to fonts, in keeping with the broader direction of PostScript, defining characters using Bézier curves. But this still left the problem of device-independence. How could Adobe's font definitions contend with different displays, printers, and different resolutions on both? For eyes accustomed to reading published text, even the slightest inconsistencies or irregularities in the appearance of text are readily noticed and jarring. At lower resolutions, the chance for these defects only becomes worse. Rendering fonts reliably at different resolutions was a critical issue. Without a solution, PostScript could never become the digital printing press. An illustration showing a lowercase \u201cm\u201d on a grid, with shaded squares around the letter and horizontal and vertical lines roughly tracing it. Elements of Adobe's secret solution to creating professional-quality fonts for different resolutions on displays and printers.John Warnock It was Warnock who came up with Adobe's solution, turning the problem itself into the solution. The resolution of the output would determine a set of procedures that would correct the fonts to optimize their appearance at that resolution. Warnock, Brotz, and Paxton worked on the procedures for months, eventually settling on ways to define key aspects of the font shapes and fitting them to the pixel rows and columns of the specified resolution, changing some aspects of the character shapes depending on the resolution. Eventually, the Adobe team decided that greatest advantage lay in keeping these approaches and procedures as a trade secret. They stayed secret in PostScript's source code, known to very few at the company, until Warnock publicly disclosed them in a 2010 lecture. In this video clip, Geschke discusses the trade secret in the PostScript source code: Chuck Geschke discusses the trade secret in the PostScript source code[96]Computer History Museum The version of the PostScript source code released to the public by the Computer History Museum is a very early version, dating to late February 1984. While this version does contain an early version of the "font hinting" procedures later kept as a trade secret, these approaches were completely rewritten, expanded, and refined by Bill Paxton in subsequent months. These changes were critical to the success of PostScript as it fully came to market. Editor's note: This post originally appeared on the blog of the [97]Computer History Museum. Acknowledgements: Thank you to Doug Brotz and Bill Paxton for their helpful comments on a draft of this essay. Thank you to Adobe and Doug Menuez for permission to use several images. This essay is based on oral histories and interviews conducted by the Computer History Museum as well as several critical published sources: John E. Warnock, "[98]The Origins of PostScript," in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 68-76, Jul.-Sep. 2018, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2018.033841112. John E. Warnock, "Simple Ideas That Changed Printing and Publishing," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 156, no. 4, 2012, pp. 363-78. JSTOR, [99]http://www.jstor.org/stable/23558230. John E. Warnock and Charles Geschke, "Founding and Growing Adobe Systems, Inc.," in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 24-34, July-Sept. 2019, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2019.2923397. From Your Site Articles * [100]Xerox Parc's Engineers on How They Invented the Future > * [101]Inventing Postscript, the Tech That Took the Pain out of Printing > Related Articles Around the Web * [102]Art of Code - CHM > * [103]PostScript: A Digital Printing Press - CHM > [104]postscript[105]Adobe[106]pdf[107]Xerox Parc [108]David C. Brock [109]David C. Brock is an historian of technology, director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum, and director of CHM's Software History Center. He focuses on histories of computing and semiconductors as well as on oral history. He is the coauthor of [110]Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary and is on Twitter @dcbrock@federate.social. 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Survey Says: LinkedIn [140]Careers[141]Topic[142]Type[143]News [144]Where the Silicon Valley Tech Internships Are [145]History of Technology[146]Topic[147]Type[148]Feature [149]Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive? Thumb drive, USB drive, memory stick: Whatever you call it, it's the brainchild of an unsung Singapore inventor [150]Hallam Stevens 10 Dec 2022 11 min read [151]Three monolithic thumb drives stand in a white landscape with blue sky and clouds behind them. Maurizio Di Iorio Blue In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called [152]Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive. That device, now known by a variety of names--including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive--changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide. The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months--from April through July 2000--it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label. Good-bye, floppy disk Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by [153]IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 ¼-inch and 3 ½-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity--even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. The Iomega Zip Drive, called a "superfloppy" drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives. Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that--and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk. $7 billion In 2021, 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. But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek. Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, [154]TEAC, [155]Toshiba, and, ultimately, [156]Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment. Competing claims about the memory stick's origin Thumbdrives photographed from below to look like a collection of skyscrapers. Maurizio Di Iorio The story of the thumb drive reveals much about innovation in the silicon age. Seldom can we attribute inventions in digital technology to one individual or company. They stem instead from tightly knit networks of individuals and companies working cooperatively or in competition, with advances made incrementally. And this incremental nature of innovation means that controlling the spread, manufacturing, and further development of new ideas is almost impossible. So it's not surprising that overlapping and competing claims surround the origin of the thumb drive. In April 1999, the Israeli company [157]M-Systems filed a patent application titled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-based PC flash disk." This was granted to Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan in November 2000. In 2000, IBM began selling M-Systems' 8-MB storage devices in the United States under the less-than-memorable name DiskOnKey. IBM has its own claim to the invention of an aspect of the device, based on a year-2000 confidential internal report written by one of its employees, Shimon Shmueli. Somewhat less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have also claimed to be the first to come up with the thumb drive. The necessary elements were certainly ripe for picking in the late 1990s. Flash memory became cheap and robust enough for consumer use by 1995. The circulation of data via the World Wide Web, including software and music, was exploding, increasing a demand for portable data storage. When technology pushes and consumers pull, an invention can seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable. And all of the purported inventors could certainly have come up with the same essential device independently. But none of the many independent stories of invention paint quite as clear an origin story--or had as much influence on the spread of the thumb drive--as the tale of Tan in Singapore. Henn Tan: From truant to entrepreneur Man with glasses sits in office chair surrounded by office furniture and computer terminals Henn Tan, shown here in 2017, fought a series of mostly losing battles against those who pirated Trek 2000's ThumbDrive design and against rival patent claims. Yen Meng Jiin/Singapore Press/AP Tan, the third of six brothers, was born and raised in a kampung (village) in the neighborhood of Geylang, Singapore. His parents, working hard to make ends meet, regularly left Tan and his brothers alone to roam the streets. The first in his family to attend high school, Tan quickly fell in with a rebellious crowd, skipping school to hang out at roadside "sarabat" (drink) stalls, dressed in "shaggy embroidered jeans, imbibing coffee and cigarettes, and tossing his long mane as he polemicized about rock music and human rights," according to a 2001 article in the Straits Times. After a caning for truancy in his third year of high school that served as a wake-up call, Tan settled down to his studies and completed his O-level exams. He entered the National Service in 1973 as a military police instructor, and after serving the required two years, he took a job as a machinist at a German multinational firm. This wasn't a rare job at the time. In the late 1960s Singapore had embarked on a crash program of industrialization, offering incentives to multinational companies, especially in such high-tech fields as electronics and semiconductors, to set up factories on the island. By the early 1970s, Singapore was home to manufacturing plants for [158]Fairchild Semiconductor, [159]General Electric, [160]Hewlett Packard, and [161]Texas Instruments, among others, joined by [162]Matsushita (now Panasonic) in 1973 and Nippon Electric Company (now [163]NEC) in 1977. Tan diligently saved money to pay for driving lessons. As soon as he had his license, NEC's semiconductors division hired him as a sales executive. Three years later, in 1980, he moved to [164]Sanyo as a regional sales manager. Over the next 15 years, he rose to the rank of sales director, accumulating a wealth of experience in the electronics industry, including connections to a range of suppliers and customers. The Asian electronics industry takes off In 1995, Tan resigned from Sanyo and purchased Trek, a small, family-run electronics component trading firm in his old neighborhood of Geylang, for just shy of US $1 million. He planned to develop products to license or sell to one or more of the many large multinationals in Singapore. Meanwhile, worldwide sales of computer equipment had started to boom. Although personal computers and various portable computers had been around since the late 1970s, both [165]Apple and IBM released flagship laptops in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Along with the popularity of laptops came a growing demand for peripherals such as displays, modems, printers, keyboards, mice, graphics adapters, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, and floppy drives. The dot-com boom of 1995 to 2000 further increased demand for personal computing gear. "Clones, in a sense, are marvelous....it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible."--Henn Tan, as told to the Straits Times Many of these electronics products, including the chips in them, were produced in Asia, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand--and Singapore--under the OEM system. These "original equipment manufacturers" made computers for Apple, Dell, and other companies who outsourced the production of their designs. By the mid-1990s, Singapore had become an important hub for electronics manufacturing, including hard drives and semiconductor wafers, and the island had a significant and growing electronics ecosystem with design and production expertise. Toshiba gives Tan his big break All this activity, however, did not create an easy path for Tan. Many of his old contacts from Sanyo wouldn't do business with a no-name like Trek. And few talented engineers wanted to work for a company that seemed to offer little guarantee of long-term employment. But Tan persisted, and after two years, in 1998, he got his big break: Toshiba Electronics in Singapore appointed Trek as an official design house, an agreement through which Trek would design and manufacture products to be sold under the Toshiba label. In particular, Toshiba wanted [166]an MP3 player, a compact and portable solid-state device that could copy music files from a computer, to which it would be connected via a USB plug, and then play the music back. Though this was before Apple's 2001 iPod made these devices popular worldwide, a number of MP3 players of varied quality were already on the market in the late 1990s. As the originator of flash memory, Toshiba manufactured storage chips used in personal computers, laptops, and digital cameras. Toshiba also made portable radios and boom boxes. It wasn't odd that the company wanted to jump into the MP3-player fray. But Tan reasoned that "if the company just manufactured the player, it would not make a lot of money," according to a 2005 article in the Straits Times. Tan thought that by leaving out the ability to play music, the device would become more versatile, able to handle not just MP3s but also text, spreadsheets, images--any kind of computer file. Many companies were already selling music players, but a cheap, USB-driven, versatile storage device might have an even bigger market, Tan suspected, and he could be first to tap it. Tan did give Toshiba its music player. But he also set his engineers to work on a product that was essentially a music player without the player. The result was the thumb drive. From popular product to pirate battle a block diagram with the words USB Connector, D12 (Driver), Micro-Controller, Flash Memory, Additional USB port, ROM, RAM, and Hard-lock Switch appearing in individual rectangles Trek's patent application for the ThumbDrive included this drawing. Getting to a working product was not trivial--the drive required not only the appropriate combination of hardware but also specially designed firmware that allowed the solid-state storage to interact with a variety of computer operating systems. But the thumb drive, with its flash memory and USB interface, was hardly a completely novel invention. Tan did not invent flash memory, which was the brainchild of Toshiba engineer Fujio Masuoka in 1980. Nor did he invent the USB port, which had been around since 1996. What was novel was the combination of the USB with flash memory plus a controller and appropriate firmware, all sealed into a plastic case to make a marketable consumer product. Local circumstances can only partly explain why the thumb drive came to be invented where and when it did: Tan's experience at NEC and Sanyo, Trek's contract with Toshiba, and the connections Trek's engineers had made during previous internships at other companies in Singapore were all important. Those same factors, however, also made the invention difficult to control. Once the idea of the thumb drive was out there, many electronics firms immediately set to making their own versions. Tan had filed a patent application for his invention a month before the 2000 CeBIT tech fair, but a pending patent did little to stop copycats. In addition to claims by M-Systems and IBM, perhaps the most complicated rivalry came from the Chinese company Netac Technology. It also claimed to have invented the flash memory stick. Cheng Xiaohua and Deng Guoshun had previously worked for Trek and had seen some development boards related to flash memory. They returned to Shenzhen, China, and founded Netac in 1999. Shenzhen at the time was a hotbed of electronics copycatting--DVD players, cellular phones, MP3 players, and numerous other consumer electronics were produced as "shanzhai" goods, outside the bounds of intellectual property laws. Netac's claim to (and production of) its thumb drive fit this pattern of appropriation. Netac and Trek subsequently even entered into an agreement under which Trek would fund some of Netac's research and development and Trek would gain rights to manufacture and distribute the resulting products outside of China. Despite this collaboration, Netac subsequently sought and was granted a patent on the thumb drive within China. Henn Tan thought that by leaving out the ability to play music, the device would become more versatile. Electronics pirates around the world then went after the thumb drive. Tan fought them hard and sometimes won. Had Trek been a larger company with more resources and more patent experience, the story might have had a different ending. As it was, though, Trek's patents stood on relatively weak ground. Beginning in 2002, Tan brought suit in Singapore against a handful of companies (including Electec, FE Global Electronics, M-Systems, and Ritronics Components) for patent infringement. After several years of court battles and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, Trek won that case, persuading the judge that his ThumbDrive was the first device ever designed to be plugged directly into a computer without the need for a cable. An appeals court in the United Kingdom, however, was not persuaded, and Trek lost its patent there in 2008. Tan also pursued, with little success, claims at the United States International Trade Commission against other companies, including Imation, IronKey, Patriot, and Verbatim. But even the decision in Singapore was little more than a moral victory. By the late 2000s, millions of thumb drives had already been produced, by countless companies, without Trek's license. "Clones," Tan told the Straits Times in 2005, "in a sense, are marvelous. In the business world, especially when you are in Asia, as long as anything makes a profit, you do it." If someone were copying you, Tan reasoned, "it meant you must have a good idea and you should make the most of it, as quickly as possible." Ultimately, Tan and Trek turned their attention to new products, each improving slightly on the last. By 2010, Trek had developed another pioneering device--the Flu Drive or Flu Card. This modified thumb drive could also wirelessly transmit data between devices or to the cloud. Although Tan still attempted to protect his invention with patents, he had also embraced a new path: success through continuous novelty. The Flu Card enjoyed modest success. Although not widely taken up as a stand-alone device, its Wi-Fi connectivity made it suitable for consumer electronics devices such as cameras and toys. In 2014, Trek signed deals with [167]Ricoh and [168]Mattel China to license the Flu Card design. Trek also attempted to move into new markets, with limited success, including the Internet of Things, cloud technology, and medical and wearable devices. Trek's struggles and Tan's fall Man with white shirt, tie, and glasses holds thumb drive labeled SWIPE close to the camera Henn Tan holds up a ThumbDrive during an interview in Singapore in January 2006.Nicky Loh/Reuters/Alamy Trek's revenue from licensing the ThumbDrive and the Flu Card was not sufficient to keep it profitable. But instead of admitting how badly the company was doing, in 2006, Tan and his chief financial officer began falsifying Trek's accounts, deceiving auditors and shareholders. After these misdeeds were revealed by financial auditors [169]Ernst & Young in 2015, Tan stepped down as chairman and chief executive and in August 2022 pled guilty to falsifying accounts. As of this writing, Tan remains in jail in Singapore. His son, Wayne Tan, continues as Trek's deputy chairman. Meanwhile, the thumb drive lives on. Although most of us transmit our files over the Internet--either as email attachments or through services like Google Drive and Dropbox--thumb drives (now running to capacities measured in terabytes) remain a convenient device for carrying data in our pockets. They are used as a quick way to transfer a file from one computer to another, pass out press kits at conferences, lock and unlock computers, carry apps to run on a shared computer, back up travel documents, and even, sometimes, store music. They are used for [170]nefarious purposes as well--stealing files or inserting malware into target computers. And they are especially useful for the secure transfer of encrypted data too sensitive to send over the Internet. In 2021, global sales of the devices from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028, [171]according to Vantage Market Research. Hero or antihero? Often, we think of inventors as heroes, boldly going where no one has gone before. But Tan's story isn't that simple. Tan does deserve a place in consumer electronics history--he conceived the device without seeing one first, made it work, manufactured it in quantities, and spread it broadly, both intentionally through licensing and unintentionally through copying. But full credit for the thumb drive really belongs more to the environment--the ideas circulating at the time and the networks of clients and suppliers--than any individual. Moreover, the conclusion of Tan's story suggests he is more antihero than hero. We usually admire inventors for their tenacity and grit. In Tan's case, these qualities contributed to his downfall. Determined to take moral and financial credit for the thumb drive, Tan went to extraordinary lengths--even breaking the law--in order to make his company and himself a success. The thumb drive shows how complicated stories of invention often are. From Your Site Articles * [172]Chip Hall of Fame: Toshiba NAND Flash Memory > * [173]How USB Came to Be > Related Articles Around the Web * [174]USB flash drive - Wikipedia > * [175]Object of Interest: The Flash Drive | The New Yorker > Keep Reading |vShow less {"imageShortcodeIds":[]} References Visible links 1. https://spectrum.ieee.org/feeds/topic/tech-history.rss 2. https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5WJB5X2 3. https://www.ieee.org/ 4. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp 5. https://standards.ieee.org/ 6. https://www.ieee.org/sitemap.html 7. https://www.ieee.org/profile/public/createwebaccount/showCreateAccount.html?ShowMGAMarkeatbilityOptIn=true&sourceCode=spectrum&signinurl=https://spectrum.ieee.org/core/saml/main/login&url=https://spectrum.ieee.org/&autoSignin=Y&car=IEEE-Spectrum 8. https://spectrum.ieee.org/st/join 9. https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/aerospace/ 10. https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/artificial-intelligence/ 11. 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