Early memory cards cost 100 dollars per megabyte and needed batteries
Some of the first PCMCIA memory cards held just 1 to 5 megabytes at around 100 dollars per megabyte, and many relied on a lithium battery to keep their contents alive. In 1992 SanDisk's FlashDisk changed that, using flash memory that remembered data without power, the technology inside nearly every memory card since.
Toshiba engineer Fujio Masuoka came up with flash memory in 1980, and his employer began selling it in 1987. Memory cards emerged in the 1980s as a lighter, smaller, less power-hungry alternative to floppy drives in laptops, and as a cheaper substitute for game cartridges; Sega's cards were one example. Early on, a jumble of incompatible formats competed, from the Bee Card to Mitsubishi's Melcard.
Standards arrived slowly. Japan's electronics industry body JEIDA started work in 1985, and PCMCIA, formed in 1989, adopted its 68-pin connector and released the first PC Card specification in 1990. PC Cards survive mostly in industrial equipment. Smaller formats followed from 1994, beginning with CompactFlash, and phones, handheld organisers and compact cameras demanded ever tinier cards.
Then came a format war. SD was announced in 2000 as a single card for many devices. In 2001 SmartMedia held half the digital camera market and CompactFlash dominated professional cameras, while prices of about 3 dollars per megabyte even encouraged miniature spinning disks such as the Microdrive. Those disks were obsolete by 2006 as flash grew cheaper, SD had largely displaced SmartMedia by 2005, and from 2010 even Sony and Olympus, loyal to their own Memory Stick and xD formats, added SD slots.
By 2024 SD cards, including the tiny microSD, were the most common type. They fill cameras, drones, dashcams, e-readers and handheld consoles, although many phones now rely only on built-in storage. For 4K and 8K video and rapid burst photography, faster formats such as CFexpress emerged in the late 2010s, largely replacing XQD while keeping the same physical shape.
Source: Memory card
