Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Fujio Masuoka's team built a cell that held its data with no power, and Intel sold the first commercial chip in 1988. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

Flash memory was invented at Toshiba in 1980

Fujio Masuoka's team built a cell that held its data with no power, and Intel sold the first commercial chip in 1988 Masuoka proposed NOR flash in 1984 and NAND flash three years later, naming the technology for the way an erase happens in one flash. Each cell stores charge on a floating gate that keeps its state when power is removed. Intel shipped the first commercial flash chip in 1988, and NAND became the basis of memory cards and solid state drives. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Britannica

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Technology trivia

More facts like this

Flash cells wear out after a few thousand erasesNAND must be erased a whole block at a time, so controllers spread writes across spare blocks to even the damage RAID was named in a 1988 Berkeley paperThree researchers described ways to combine cheap disks so one could fail without losing the data Paper tape stored programs as rows of holesTeletypes and early minicomputers read tape punched with eight data channels and a clocking sprocket hole Blu-ray uses a violet laser to pack in dataA 405 nanometre laser and a thin cover layer let one layer of a disc hold 25 gigabytes, five times a DVD Magnetic tape still archives most large data setsLinear Tape-Open cartridges stay offline and cost far less per terabyte than spinning disks Stored files can rot without anyone touching themMagnetic, optical and flash media all lose data slowly, and a checksum is often the only sign that anything changed

Tags: flash-memory, storage, toshiba

Flash memory was invented at Toshiba in 1980: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Fujio Masuoka's team built a cell that held its data with no power, and Intel sold the first commercial chip in 1988. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.