USB Drive or Flash Drive? What's the Difference?

If you've ever bought a small portable unit for school or office (or received a gift like a trade fair), you probably have heard many names jump drive, memory card, flash drive, USB memory or USB drive.

What does 'USB' Stand For?

Of all the colloquialisms, the right is the USB drive, USB stand for 'Universal Serial Bus. "Unless you consider yourself to be a monster nerd / geek / computer, this term is likely to mean nothing to you, but the "team talk" is actually simpler than it seems.

Universal Serial Bus simply refers to the development of a new universal standard of connections between all your computer peripherals can be used with other electronic devices. The keyboard and mouse were the first (though they are increasingly wireless, as technology improves), but other components including printers, external drives, cameras, and more recently, PDAs, and smartphones. The term 'series' means that the new protocol was to replace the current selection of parallel or serial ports (such as old-style connectors 'pin' for printers).
The push for this new protocol came, not surprisingly, from electronic manufacturers and software developers who were facing increasingly complex configurations of devices to be connected to computers. In 1994, a group of seven companies - Compaq, Dell, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel began development of the USB drive (and corresponding USB ports). Intel produced the first silicon for USB in 2005. By 2008 over 2 billion USB devices were being sold each year.
So Where Did The Other Names Come From?
The drives enabled files to 'jump' from one computer to another, the cheapest drives look like small plastic 'sticks' (usually black), and they're about the size of your 'thumb' (though getting smaller all the time!). The term 'flash' refers to the 'flash memory' chip (that pre-dated USB drives by about 15 years) that could be electrically erased and reprogrammed multiple times.
IBM produced the first commercially available USB drive in 2000 with a storage capacity of 8MB - pitifully small by today's standards but still more than five times the capacity of the floppy disks in use at the time. Storage capacity has grown exponentially since then - Kingston introduced its Data Traveler 300 in 2009 with 256GB of storage capacity, and the 512GB can't be far behind.
Unfortunately, transfer speed hasn't grown quite as quickly. USB1.0, released in 1996, allowed a data transfer speed of between 1.5 and 12 Mbits/s (Megabits of memory per second). USB2.0 was released in April 2000 with a "Hi-Speed" bandwidth of 480 Mbits/s (about 60MB per second). USB3.0 was announced in November 2008 with transmission speeds of up to 5Gbits/s but new drives are only just starting to come to market.