You're finishing up your work, you have all the documents done for a presentation you are working on to present to your co-workers. But you find out you do not have enough room on your computer to hold all the documents you worked on. Luckily, you have a special device desined for this sort of thing. A flash drive.
Flash drives were designed to hold digital documents and carry them from place to place from the safety of your pocket. Its small size and flexibility to work on all computers no matter what type or how small is what made the flash drive so important in an office environment. Though they have also been used for questionable means as well, such as stealing government documents that are meant to be confidential. As such a large number of national facilities for this reason and only high ranking officials with special permissions may use them.
Flash drives were first made as flash memory, a method widely used for storing information on smaller devices such as phones or flash drives. It was a method that was extremely expensive when it was invented in the late 1980s. It was the first piece of technology that would have made up flash drives and would have later become widely used as well as very inexpensive. The second piece of technology, Universal serial bus (USB) was developed in the mid-nineties to both simplify connnecting computers as well as creating a standardized port that works on all devices. By the end of the 90s, both these technologies would ahve become inexpensive and easy to use for the mass populace.
The invention of the flash drive is very dubious and controversal. Some say a now non- existing Israeli company called M-systems (Which is now part of SanDisk) was responsible, while another company, I.B.M. filed a patent of a flash drive that was designed by Shimon Shmueli. Who invented the flash drive is controversial as we do not know who to really credit with its invention, but the first company to sell it was Trek 2000, a singaporean company who marketed the flash drive as a ThumbDrive.
Originally, flash drives held only 8 megabytes. Which considering that the only form of portable memory was 1.44 megabyte floppy disks, it was a needed quality of life for most officeworkers and business nonetheless. As time has gone on, Flash drive's capacity has improves and so has their prices. Flash drives which can hold not just megabytes, but gigabytes of data barely cost anything when around the time of their release, they could only hold eight megabytes. To put this in perspective, a single megabyte is one million bytes. A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes, so a flash drive containing that many bytes of information is a huge development.
Unfortunately, this is not without its controversies. Why should someone use flash drive when they can backup their information on the cloud? Since the cloud is completely non-physical and your data will always be safe and easily accessible over the internet. Well since flash drives are not over the internet, they become untraceable. As such, they became a covert way of both stealing and distributing information.
Like all technologies, flash drives still have their faults as well as things they can offer to companies. One should still find value in flash drives as a seperate space of additional storage.
Flash drive Timeline:
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