As we have seen throughout this series so far, any portable audio revolution is usually preceded by years, or even decades, of research and development before an idea reaches a level of maturity for it to take off. However, an idea of Toshiba electrical engineer Fujio Masuoka was so far-reaching that it would have ramifications well beyond the field of portable audio. As tech giants Sony and Philips were prepping the Compact Disc, Masuoka’s invention of fast-erase floating-gate memory would set in motion the development of the world’s first practical no-moving-parts data storage device. The global technology industry, portable audio in particular, was about to move into the fast lane.
No moving parts
Masuoka had already been quite prolific during his early days at Japanese tech titan Toshiba. He had developed the 1Mbit Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chip in 1977, but his true passion was for a memory chip that didn’t need power to retain data. Electrically-Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) was the hot storage technology of the 1970s and, unlike standard DRAM that powers our PCs today, could retain data when power was removed. What made EEPROM so important for its time was that it only required an electrical voltage to erase data — previous chips required ultraviolet light to do the job. Even so, the erase process in EEPROM was still quite
