SSD in 1983

archive.org

1 pointkjofol4 comments

That's an SSD by rather loose analogy. It used regular semiconductor memory to implement a disk, which makes it closer to a ramdisk. The data was volatile, and would disappear without power either from the bus or from battery.

If this is an SDD then a USB memory stick is also an SSD.

Well, a USB memory stick is an SSD or, at least, is much much closer to an SSD than that technology mentioned in the article.

You're right. I thought the term 'SSD' implied NAND-based memory. According to Wikipedia, it doesn't at all have that implication. It lists examples of "Early SSDs using RAM and similar technology":

> In 1976 Dataram started selling a product called Bulk Core, which provided up to 2 MB of solid state storage compatible with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Data General (DG) computers.[16] In 1978, Texas Memory Systems introduced a 16 kilobyte RAM solid-state drive to be used by oil companies for seismic data acquisition.[17] The following year, StorageTek developed the first RAM solid-state drive.[18]

I had one of those drives at one of my accounts when I worked for StorageTek. Pretty impressive piece of gear for the time, and thankfully they were pretty solid - I feared ever having to work on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com