Answer: ThumbDrive

While it certainly feels like the ubiquitous USB flash drive has always been around, the first commercial USB-based flash drive didn’t appear on the market until 2000.

Introduced by Trek Technology, a hardware firm based out of Singapore, the original flash drive bore the name ThumbDrive and sported a whopping 8MB of storage–a little over four times the storage capacity of the 3.5″ floppy drives the ThumbDrive sought to replace. Later that year IBM released their own flash-based USB storage key known as the DiskOnKey.

Despite the best efforts of both companies to defend patents and control flash drive production, the market was quickly flooded with unauthorized knock-offs. The previous king of portable storage, the floppy disk, was quick driven into retirement.