A trip down memory lane: A visit to Lexar's impressive memory museum in Zhongshan, China

Shortly after Computex earlier this month, Lexar was kind enough to offer journalists a tour of their headquarters and manufacturing facilities in China. It was an eye-opening experience. Not just for the beauty and cultural experience of China, but for witnessing Lexar's space-age manufacturing, quality control measures, and compatibility testing. Lexar takes pride in being a provider of storage and memory solutions.

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It has been said that storage is the foundation of civilization. That's not some throwaway cheesy line. Think about it. Almost everything we know of ancient history and antiquity comes from tablets and scrolls, artifacts, books, and documents. Moving forward, we have punch cards, typewriters, drums, floppy disks, and hard drives. These days we have DRAM, SD cards, and SSDs. Who knows where we'll go next. DNA storage? Holographics?

Storage is more important than ever. In an online world, nearly everyone has a digital footprint. That's saying nothing about the insatiable demands that come from AI. All those 1s and 0s need to be stored somewhere, whether it's in memory or persistent storage. Without storage, well, we'd be screwed to put it mildly.

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Longsys is Lexar's parent company. Its headquarters are located in Zhongshan, China. Zhongshan is a part of the Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou megalopolis. The region is a center of global technology manufacturing. I half expected to see endless factories belching out smoke, but visiting the region quickly changed that. The Longsys HQ is incredibly clean and well-maintained. It even has a traditional tea house surrounded by wetlands on site, complete with fish, swans, and ducks.

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But in my opinion, the most interesting part of the tour was the visit to the Lexar Memory Museum. It isn't just a showcase of Lexar's products, but a multi-floor experience that rivals some of the exhibitions you'll find at a museum. It's a museum for geeks!

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Chinese culture goes back thousands of years, so it's no surprise to see some of the earliest recorded history originate from the region. The Lexar Memory Museum contains ancient bowls, ropes and scrolls that depict life in early societies. The ropes in particular are an early form of storage, which were used before the development of written languages.

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Jumping forward a few thousand years, we come to punch cards. Their use heralded one of the earliest forms of automation, notably with the invention of the Jacquard machine, which used pre-punched cards to control the weave pattern of fabrics 25 times faster than previous machines were capable of. High-tech stuff back in 1804! Punch cards continued to be used for hundreds of years, particularly in the Soviet Union into the 1980s.

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Typewriters made their first practical appearance in 1868. The elders among us will remember them fondly, though perhaps not the noise they made! I'm sure my school had examples a little like the IBM beast in the picture above. Yes, I am that old.

Typewriters introduced the QWERTY standard, which remains the de facto standard layout for English computer keyboards. Typewriters were an essential office tool until the 1980s, when they were quickly overtaken by the introduction of personal computers and word processing software.

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The above picture depicts a part of an Atanasoff-Berry computer, which is considered to be the world's first automatic digital computer. It was built in 1942. It included an arithmetic logic unit, which is a part of every modern processor. However, it still relied on punch cards, which greatly limited its usefulness.

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Storage was a major limitation for early computers, but the introduction of the IBM 350 drive in 1956 introduced a shift away from punch cards to near instant data access and retrieval. It was a part of the IBM 305 RAMAC which weighed over a ton. Its average access time is around 600 to 800 milliseconds, which is extraordinary for the technology of the time. The above picture shows one of the drive's platters. With around 100 of these platters, the IBM 350 could store 3.75 MB.

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These disks might be a little more familiar to the 80s kids! The 8-inch floppy disk was introduced in 1971, providing up to 1.2MB in a dual-sided configuration. The smaller 5.25-inch disk was a common feature of early personal computers, including my first computer, the Commodore 64. The Bernoulli disk combined fluid dynamics with a rugged design. It could hold up to 150MB. Finally, the Ultra Density Optical (UDO) disk could hold up to 30 GB. It's designed for long-term data archival.

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Now we're getting towards modern times! I still have five or six Laserdiscs, but no player to play them. The humble CD needs little introduction. It's still commonly available today, though less so with the advent of USB drives, memory cards, streaming, and cloud services. On the right is a Discman portable audio player. I still have one of them buried in a box at my parents' house.

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The Hard Disk Drive became a standard component as the fledgling personal computer market matured in the 1980s. The Seagate 5.25in drive at the top left of the image above could hold 5 MB, while by the early 1990s, 1GB drives were available. The 2.5in and 3.5in form factors remain familiar to this day, while the far superior areal density of modern drives gives them orders of magnitude more capacity.

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Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) was commercialized in 1969, though the first successful designs didn't appear until the early 1970s. The picture above shows a 1975 16KB memory module, produced by IBM at the top left. 16KB modules dominated the market until Japanese manufacturers began producing higher-density yet cheaper chips in the 1980s and 1990s before Korean companies such as SK Hynix and Samsung began to dominate, which they continue to do to this day.

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The earliest development of flash memory dates back to the invention of floating-gate MOSFET in 1960, but it took several years for practical applications to emerge. Commercial NAND launched in 1987. The Compact Flash card made its debut in 1994, it was based on the PCMCIA and PC Card standards. Other devices soon followed, including MMC, XD, Memory Stick, and SD. The introduction of non-volatile storage paved the way for portable digital devices and embedded NAND memory is an indispensable part of most modern digital devices.

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I spotted this OCZ DDR3-1600 memory kit with 7-7-7 timings. I think I used this exact kit with an X58 motherboard back in the day. OCZ discontinued making RAM in 2011. The nostalgia is strong with this one!

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Console enthusiasts will recognize the significance of the Nintendo Famicom. It was later redesigned and released as the Nintendo Entertainment System in non-Japanese markets in 1985.

I will end with a thank you to Lexar for its hospitality over the course of the tour. It was a great experience to see what happens behind the scenes and the work that goes into technologies that many of us take for granted. Let's just hope we have the ability to read all of this data in 100+ years. My small Laserdisc collection would like to say hi!