8. Flash Cards

Owners of phones and cameras, whether of the still or video variety, take flash cards for granted today, as they provide enough storage space to last until you can offload your photos or videos. But they, too, had to start somewhere. Flash memory was developed in the early 1980s, but not popularized until over a decade later, when SanDisk produced the first CompactFlash disks (built around NOR, rather than NAND, flash); Intel’s MiniCard and Toshiba’s SmartMedia card followed suit within a year or so. Cards using these, and other subsequent formats (such as Secure Digital, or SD), were always ideal for laptops, which had (and, in many cases, still have) limited space for hard or optical drives. And as computers became more powerful, and photo- and video-editing software became more useful outside of professional or even just hobbyist conclaves of PC owners, flash card readers began showing up on desktops as well, often in bays that had previously been occupied by 3.5-inch drives. Flash cards have never represented a major storage system for PC users, even as flash memory itself has become the next-generation way of storing data in USB and solid-state drives. But they’ve grown increasingly useful as a supplement now that everyone has some way of capturing data on—and thus some desire to want to read—these go-anywhere solutions.

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