E.g. EPROM (memory type chip) is typically deleted by shining a uv light on the actual silicon die, through a uv transparent quartz window in the final packaged chip.
edit: fixed EEPROM -> EPROM
Yeah I remember a friend of mine back around '90 wanted to try it out. I can't remember if it was using DRAM or EPROM memory though. I want to say it was called 'ramra' or 'ramera'.
Also, EPROMs are extremely vintage. They were replaced by EEPROMs - the first of which came out in 1977. That's an... extremely vintage example.
And thanks for the info, I don't have direct experience dealing with EPROM and I had conflated EEPROM and EPROM together in my mind, but a quick google search quickly reveals my inadequate knowledge, which has now been updated, even if only good enough for trivia.
IIRC, EPROMs were still cheaper than EEPROMs for many years. EPROMs probably were sold in commercial quantities well into the 80s, and maybe used in the 90s.
EPROMs were erased by just throwing them into a UV-bin and blasting them with UV light. In contrast, EEPROMs needed transistors inside to handle the erasing cycle.
Finally, EPROM's last stand was as a low-cost one-time-programmable ROM (aka: PROM). All you had to do was make the same chip except without the expensive "window" (that'd normally receive UV-light for erasure).
I had professors who were active during the time and gave me the rundown. I have touched EPROMs and all that good stuff, still part of the labs at my college and my professor liked talking about "the good ol days". But I've never in fact used them in any practical manner.
That's vintage, isn't it? In the 90's, stuff from the 60's was 'vintage'. By 2022... the 90's are vintage?
That being said, I have to agree that the word 'vintage' evokes the 50-70s more than the 90s. Maybe the word has just come to mean that era in the english language, just like 'olden days' tends to mean a pre/semi-industrialized era that's somewhat locked in time.
Perhaps we're running out of words for the past and we simply call these eras by their decades now.
IIRC, students recently graduated when I was doing my freshman year had used them for projects in their freshman year, but not since - so they were probably commonplace until 1990 or so. At least in Trondheim, Norway.
Industrial equipment moves at a different pace, and in these days of 10x price jumps and "52 week" lead times, sometimes dusty relics from the 80s wind up being relevant in 2022!