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Who invented flash memory in the early 1980s?
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Flash memory was invented in the early 1980s by the Japanese engineer Masuoka Fujio while he was employed at the Toshiba Corporation.1
Masuoka developed this technology as a way to replace existing storage media, such as floppy disks and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. The term "flash" was suggested by his colleague, Ariizumi Shoji, who compared the rapid erasure of data from an entire chip to the burst of a camera's flash.1