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What was your involvement? NVRAM or controller development? Civil or military?

I realize SSDs date back to the late 1980s. I'm fascinated by the early history.

I always saw storage as the main performance bottleneck in any computer system. I figured when cheap low-power-consumption high-capacity dependable solid state storage was achieved, we'd see a whole new world of portable devices.

It's not surprising that the first netbooks and then smartphones and tablets followed closely behind the development of MLC and TLC flash and controllers with improved wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms. Sure, improved battery and radio technologies helped but the mobile revolution was spurred by SSDs.