Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998

sdomi.pl

71 pointsLorenDB10 comments

No mention of TransFlash (TF), nor "Super Digital" (SD without the DRM)?

The history is certainly interesting and I have done a bit of research in this area too. Also, those "secret" specs can, thanks to the Eastern part of the Internet, be found relatively easily these days.

Also noteworthy in the development of solid-state mass storage is that the original small-block NAND flash command set came from Toshiba's SmartMedia (or perhaps it was the other way around.) Those are interesting in that they're raw SLC flash needing no wear leveling, with TBW ratings that surpass small and medium-size SSDs these days, despite having several orders of magnitude less capacity.

Oh, TransFlash, the code-name for SD that every Shanzhai manufacturer used. Why? I suspect they label SD as TF to avoid paying for licensing the trademark. The same thing happens with HDMI - usually they simply label those ports as HD.

It certainly could also be trademarks, but I heard that in at least some cases it's because TF only covers the storage part of the spec, whereas the full "SD" spec includes using it as an interface to non-storage stuff... although actually skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDIO_cards now, I'm less convinced that that's a hard requirement in which case I'd agree that it's 100% trademarks instead of just 90%;)

Could be trademark, but it's more likely an easy way to say "microSD" (which is what TF refers to.) TransFlash was actually SanDisk's trademark for microSD.

Or even the "Super Density Disc", where the SD card logo originated from? (hence why there's an optical disc in the SD logo)

As a user and fan of Siemens Mobile's phones I want to note that all phones with removable storage created by them both on Infineon and Qualcomm platforms and released under Siemens brand used MMC and RS-MMC cards. After mobile division was sold to BenQ, the switch to microSD happened together with rebranding to BenQ-Siemens.

Why was having SDHCI so important? Became it made controller chips interchangeable to the rest of the computer/device?

Or just because it meant people didn’t need to bit-bang manually to access the cards like I guess they had to with MMC before the host controllers came along?