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Comment by sgerenser | Hacker News Reader

I never heard of using a literal flash to reprogram EPROMs, but this wikipedia entry[1] makes your story for the origin of the term “Flashing” seem likely

EPROMs are easily recognizable by the transparent fused quartz (or on later models resin) window on the top of the package, through which the silicon chip is visible, and which permits exposure to ultraviolet light during erasing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPROM

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It does look like all the references I can find point to engineers at Toshiba in 1980 coining the name, although Google ngrams shows some references to "flash EPROM" prior to 1980, so I can't help but wonder if the idea existed at least in some form prior to 1980

Looking into it, those references look miscategorized. It's some Zambian national report that's talking about 0.18um processes (aka, 180nm) in the same paragraph, which wouldn't have come out until the very late 90s.

Heard from a greybeard that they had a demo night in university (this was probably early 80s), and one of the demos was was some sort of path-finding rover robot. Of course, it ended up being one of those projects that had show stopping bugs up until a few hours before showtime.

During demo night, it was a big hit, until a stray camera flash got (un)lucky and wiped the microcontroller's EEPROM...

Feels a little apocryphal (I'd assume most flashes have / had UV filters?)

This still happens today. Some chip packaging doesn't provide enough protection from UV.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99042

You would have put some tape over the window to keep that from happening.

Also erasing takes like 15+ mins, it wasn’t quick.

These things were used in a number of computers from the early 90s, I have a few lying around for my Amiga.

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