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[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.
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[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 @[email protected].
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[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 >

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