> holdover from early reprogrammable ROM technology, non-volatile memory that you could erase by literally flashing a literal flashbulb No. I can see how that

> holdover from early reprogrammable ROM technology, non-volatile memory that you could erase by literally flashing a literal flashbulb No. I can see how that might appear plausible but they're unrelated. Flash was a marketing term invented to differentiate a new EEPROM technology that allowed much higher density, and featured sector erase, from previous EEPROM tech. This was done because engineers saw EEPROM as esoteric expensive tech that had no place in low cost products. The Flash vendors wanted to position the new chips as replacing UVPROM, which was relatively cheap by comparison. So they came up with a name that was a) not EEPROM and b) conveyed that the devices were quickly reprogrammed vs UVPROMs (which had to be baked in an eraser then took some minutes to program in a special piece of equipment). Flash's big advantage was that it could be programmed on-board, allowing soldered down PROMs, surface mount packages. Source: I was a hardware design engineer when Flash was introduced and heard the marketing pitch first hand. Using Flash chips for rewritable bulk persistent storage came much later. The first generation devices didn't have the necessary density.