Why is the memory card called flash card?

Perhaps few people know how to call flash memory or memory card today comes from calling the flash on the phone camera or camera.

The memory card used in digital cameras or phones is a type of flash memory, which is a kind of static electrical memory, which can erase and record electrical data.

The memory card that we often see everyday.

According to Petapixel, flash memory was invented in 1984 by a Japanese electrical engineer called Fujio Masuoka. He used to work at Toshiba. The operation of writing data to flash memory involves changing certain bits from 1 to 0. Deleting all data will reset all deleted bits to value 1.

Mr. Fujio Masuoka.

After observing the process, a Masuoka colleague at Toshiba named Shōji Ariizumi thought of camera flashes. The flash on the camera works by projecting a beam of light in a very short moment into the object to increase the brightness of the image. Ariizumi reminded that idea to Masuoka and suggested to name the technology "flash memory".

The name represents the ability to record and delete data at a very fast speed of this type of mobile memory.

Masuoka represents Toshiba for the first time introducing flash memory at the IEEE International Electronics Conference in 1984 in San Francisco, USA. So far, flash memory has become an extremely important and popular electronic product globally. Flash memory is available in many memory device variants such as SD, microSD, flash drive (USB) or solid state drive (SSD), etc.

Flash memory is present on many memory device variants.

Unfortunately, Masuoka's flash memory is not "backward" as many people assume. Toshiba at that time paid Masuoka a small bonus, only "a few hundred dollars" , while thanks to this technology, many technology corporations including Toshiba have earned billions of dollars to this day.

Masuoka sued Toshiba in 2004 and asked for $ 9 million in compensation. However, in the end of the lawsuit in 2006, Toshiba paid only this talented engineer for 755 thousand USD. Disgruntled with Toshiba's behavior, Masuoka quit his job and returned to become a professor at Tohoku University.