Computer History Museum

Harari, Eli oral history

This interview with Eli Harari describes his early background, growing up in Israel after WWII and education at Cambridge in England. He came to the US, received a Physics degree from Princeton, having done research into failure modes of semiconductors in outer space. He took this knowledge to Hughes Aircraft where he played a lead role in the development of the first EEPROM. With this background, he was then recruited to work at Intel. The interview covers his subsequent move to Synertek, and his founding of two startups: Wafer Scale Integration and San Disk, including lessons learned from failures and triumphs of each. The most notable of the latter was the development of System Flash. Mr. Harari describes how they took a fundamentally limited-life technology, EEPROM, and turned it into a revolutionary storage technology which has fueled the mobile revolution over the past 20 years. During that time, SanDisk grew the complexity of their chips from 4 megabits to 64 gigabits and reduced the cost by 30,000x.

Item Details

Date
2011-06-15 (Made)
Type
Document
Catalogue number
102745933
Organization
Computer History Museum (Publisher)
People
Eric Dennis (Videographer)
Eli Harari (Interviewee)
Jim Porter (Interviewer)
George Alexy (Interviewer)
Category
Transcript
Extent
20 p.
Place of publication
USA/CA/Mountain View
Language
English
Acquisition number
X6066.2011
Subject
SanDisk, Toshiba Corporation, Hughes Aircraft, Storage History, SEEQ Technology, Inc., Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EPROM), Flash, CCD, Semiconductor History, Moore's Law, Kodak
Archive collection
Oral history collection
Archive hierarchy
CHM Oral History Collection