It was Amir Ban, Oron Ogdan and Dov Moran, all employees of the Israeli electronic company called M-Systems who invented the USB drive, in 1998. They did so because they came across computer problems while engaged in a presentation to a group of investors. This amazing USB drive brought together its speed and connectivity and the steadiness of Flash memory. M-Systems introduced their first ever USB pen drive in 2000. At that time, other players like Trek Technology and Netac Technology joined in the fray and started marketing USB pen drives.
A USB pen drive is a small device that is around three inches long and half an inch wide, and it can store a lot of information. By 2009, pen drives were manufactured that could hold an incredible 128 GB of information, while smaller drives comes with 2GB to 8GB information storage capacities which are cheap and universally available. This has made it considerably easy to store data on a large scale, portability. And with the introduction of Universal Serial Bus sockets, these pen drives became accessible universally.
In 2004, a whopping 51 million USB pen drives came to be sold, evidently signifying the rapid spread of the combination of the two technologies. What is unique about this device is that it makes use of flash memory, so that it doesn’t need any power to preserve the data it contains. This enables this wonder drive to store as well as backup important data in an essentially portable manner.
As it often happens in the field of electronics, the introduction of the USB pen drive was followed by many innovations and updates. Beginning with the USB 1.0, it culminated in the latest USB 3.0 that boasts of near-total compatibility and extremely high speeds of transferring data. With the introduction of wireless technologies like Blue Tooth, Wireless USBs also have come into being that can stream data across a whole range of devices like printers, cameras etc.