[dragontamer]

> Also, EPROMs are extremely vintage. They were replaced by EEPROMs - the first of which came out in 1977. That's an... extremely vintage example.

IIRC, EPROMs were still cheaper than EEPROMs for many years. EPROMs probably were sold in commercial quantities well into the 80s, and maybe used in the 90s.

EPROMs were erased by just throwing them into a UV-bin and blasting them with UV light. In contrast, EEPROMs needed transistors inside to handle the erasing cycle.

Finally, EPROM's last stand was as a low-cost one-time-programmable ROM (aka: PROM). All you had to do was make the same chip except without the expensive "window" (that'd normally receive UV-light for erasure).

[lb1lf]

Studying EE in the late nineties, I can remember coming across EPROM microcontrollers a few times, but definitely not in new projects.

IIRC, students recently graduated when I was doing my freshman year had used them for projects in their freshman year, but not since - so they were probably commonplace until 1990 or so. At least in Trondheim, Norway.

[jjoonathan]

I just flashed (literally, shined UV light through the window) and reprogrammed a few EPROMs on a pair of HP 83623a signal generators yesterday to facilitate moving a module from one, where we didn't need it, to another, where we did.

Industrial equipment moves at a different pace, and in these days of 10x price jumps and "52 week" lead times, sometimes dusty relics from the 80s wind up being relevant in 2022!

[babagabooj]

True. I was there. So were you, I assume. The previous poster was most likely speculating.

[dragontamer]

Nah, I'm once removed.

I had professors who were active during the time and gave me the rundown. I have touched EPROMs and all that good stuff, still part of the labs at my college and my professor liked talking about "the good ol days". But I've never in fact used them in any practical manner.

[analognoise]

No, I know they cost less for a while, but the 90's were 30 years ago.

That's vintage, isn't it? In the 90's, stuff from the 60's was 'vintage'. By 2022... the 90's are vintage?

[AnimalMuppet]

We look back on the 60s with nostalgia. The 90s? Not so much. I think that colors our definition of what is "vintage".

[elevaet]

This might just be your perspective. No idea your age, but personally as someone who was a teen/young adult in the 90s participating in the emerging rave culture, the 90s are dripping with nostalgia.

That being said, I have to agree that the word 'vintage' evokes the 50-70s more than the 90s. Maybe the word has just come to mean that era in the english language, just like 'olden days' tends to mean a pre/semi-industrialized era that's somewhat locked in time.

Perhaps we're running out of words for the past and we simply call these eras by their decades now.