【Sea and River Night Talks】Finally, something decent to show off – 20 years since the invention of the USB flash drive
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In 1999, two men from Hunan Province, Deng Guoshun and Cheng Xiaohua, invented a product that could replace traditional floppy disks in an apartment in Shenzhen; they named this product \"USB flash drive\". Subsequently, Deng Guoshun took their products to the \"China International High-Tech Fair.\" At this fair, the emergence of USB drives caused an immediate sensation in the industry; they were deemed to completely replace traditional floppy disks, thereby giving rise to a whole new industry based on flash memory drives worldwide. On November 14, 1999, Deng Guoshun and Cheng Xiaohua applied for a patent for a USB flash drive, namely an invention patent for “a flash electronic external storage method and device for data processing systems”.
The USB flash drive was originally a trademark of Lexar, but over time it somehow became a generic term. In 1999, Deng Guoshun and his partner Cheng Xiaohua used 150,000 yuan in capital to register what is now Shenzhen Netac Technology Co., Ltd. They were the first in the world to successfully develop a new generation of removable storage devices—the flash drive (named “USB Flash Drive”; this name is now a trademark of Netac). In July 2002, Lexar obtained a patent for flash drives in China, and in December 2004, it received a patent with the same scope of protection in the United States. This foundational patent laid a solid basis for Lexar’s survival and its subsequent success. In 2006, Lexar obtained another fundamental patent related to mobile storage in the United States. Lenovo won all of its patent infringement lawsuits, becoming the first company in China to generate profits from patent fees, and it did so through legal actions. On October 22, 2008, Lexar Corporation announced that it had received another invention patent grant in the United States; the Chinese title of this patent is “A Method for Automatically Executing and Starting a Host Computer Using a Semiconductor Storage Device”. What sets this patent apart is that it addresses key technical issues such as how flash drives can be automatically recognized by the system host and used to start up the host. This patented technology represents the final breakthrough that enables flash drives to replace floppy disks and drives; its official licensing further solidifies Lexar’s position as a pioneer in the field of flash memory applications worldwide
In its financial reports, Lexar Technology also issued a series of risk warnings, including the key one that the patent related to USB drives will expire on November 14, 2019; as of now, there are less than 3 months left until the expiration of this patent protection. In addition to this, there is also the risk of replacement by new technologies; services such as cloud storage and cloud computing, which have gained prominence in the past two years, are gradually replacing USB drives. For now, Lexar’s core business remains the flash memory and mobile storage sectors; without the revenue generated from licensing its key foundational patents, its future performance does not look promising.
Learn* it a bit. So that’s how USB drives work.
The rapid development of electronic technology; the future seems both real and illusory
It will probably take several decades before something can replace USB drives. Network storage is insecure, unreliable, and uncontrollable; who would dare to store a company’s critical secrets in cloud storage?
Anyway, cloud storage services are unreliable; it’s safer to store data on USB drives or external hard drives.