E is for EEPROM
An EEPROM by any other name would still be as non-volatile…
Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory is a bit of a mouthful, (not that EEPROM is much better), but mouthful or not, I wouldn’t be typing this without the humble EEPROM.
You may recognise it better as a BIOS chip or through it’s descendent, the Flash Memory Drive. The EEPROM allows us to keep data in memory after power has been removed.[1]
Without EEPROM’s we wouldn’t be able to save music to our iPods, take pictures on our digital camera’s, backup data to thumb drives, and so son. The list is endless. Anywhere you find a BIOS chip or flash memory, you’ll find an EEPROM.
- As opposed to RAM, which requires power to remember it’s contents – RAM doesn’t even try, I’d call that laziness. [↩]