As we’ve seen throughout this series, 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, it was to 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 development of the world’s first practical no-movingparts data storage device. The global tech industry, and portable audio in particular, were about to move into the fast lane.
No moving parts
Masuoka had already been quite prolific during his early days at Japanese tech giant Toshiba. He’d developed the 1Mbit Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chip in 1977, but his 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, EEPROM 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 EPROM chips required ultraviolet light to do the job. Even so, the erase process in EEPROM was still quite slow, but EEPROM nevertheless found
