Intel 1702
The Intel 1702 was the first commercially available EPROM, introduced by Intel in 1971, a 2-kilobit erasable programmable read-only memory that turned Dov Frohman's floating-gate invention into a product the industry could buy and use. Its significance is that it made reusable non-volatile memory a reality in the marketplace rather than a laboratory result: engineers could now purchase a chip, program it with their data, and later erase it with ultraviolet light and reprogram it, all with standard parts and equipment. As the first product of its kind, the 1702 established the EPROM as a practical tool and anchored a product category that would matter for decades.
The 1702 embodied the floating-gate, UV-erasable principle in a shippable, standardized part, which is what separates a product from an invention. It used the floating-gate storage that held each bit as trapped charge without power, and it came in the characteristic package with a quartz window through which ultraviolet light could erase the whole chip. By packaging the underlying physics into a reliable, catalog-orderable component with defined programming and erasing procedures, Intel converted a device-physics breakthrough into something a working engineer could design around, which is the step that gives an invention its real-world impact.
The 1702 arrived in the same window as the first microprocessors, and that timing made it unusually valuable. The year 1971 also saw Intel's 4004 microprocessor, and the pairing is not a coincidence of convenience but a genuine synergy: microprocessor-based systems needed somewhere to store their programs, and during development those programs changed constantly. The 1702 gave engineers a place to hold firmware that could be revised as often as needed, so the first reusable non-volatile memory and the first microprocessors grew up together, each making the other more useful.
As the first commercial EPROM, the 1702 set expectations and conventions that successor parts refined rather than replaced. Later EPROMs offered more capacity, faster programming, and improvements in reliability and ease of use, but they followed the template the 1702 established: a floating-gate memory in a windowed package, programmed electrically and erased by ultraviolet light. The 1702 therefore functions as the reference point for an entire family of parts, the first rung of a ladder that climbed in density and convenience while keeping the fundamental approach the 1702 introduced to the market.
The 1702's broader importance is as proof that erasable non-volatile memory was commercially viable, which encouraged the investment that led to EEPROM and flash. Demonstrating that customers would buy and rely on a reusable floating-gate memory validated the whole direction of charge-storage non-volatile memory. That commercial success helped justify continued development, which produced electrically erasable memory and eventually flash, the dense rewritable storage in modern devices. The 1702 is thus both a specific historic product and an early signal that the floating-gate approach had a large commercial future.
Read the Intel 1702 as the EPROM made real: the first floating-gate, UV-erasable memory you could actually buy, arriving alongside the first microprocessors to give their ever-changing firmware a reusable home, and proving the commercial viability of the charge-storage memory that leads to flash.