Good point. I pulled this from wiki - note NEC appears to be an EEPROM leader at the time ... so your desk right be part of the early development effort to create EEPROMs. >History In the early 1970s, some companies and organizations began to develop EEPROM. In 1972, the EEPROM device was successfully manufactured **In 1975, NEC’s semiconductor operations unit and later NEC Electronics (now Renesas Electronics) granted the tradename EEPROM® to the Japan Patent Office.** In 1978, the trademark right was granted and registered as No. 1,342,184 in Japan, which was still valid until March 2018. In February 1977, Eliyahou Harari of Hughes Aircraft Company invented a new EEPROM technology, which uses the Fowler-Nordheim tunneling technology, passing through a thin layer of silicon dioxide between the floating gate and the wafer. Hughes continued to produce this new EEPROM device. But the patent cited NEC's EEPROM® From 1976 to around 1978, the Intel’s team including George Perlegos made some inventions to enhance this tunneling EEPROM technology. In 1978, the Intel’s team developed a 16K (2K word × 8) bit Intel 2816 device with a thin silicon dioxide layer of less than 200Å. In 1980, this structure was publicly introduced in the form of FLOTOX; floating gate tunnel oxide. The FLOTOX structure improved the reliability of the erase/write cycle per byte up to 10,000 times.