Q And, Mr. Norris, at the time that figure 1 was created,
could you store an analog signal as digital data without
converting it?
A No. You couldn't store the analog signal, either.
Q So in order to get something ready for storage, we've got
to do something to it; is that right?
A A whole bunch of processing.
Q Okay.
What else do we need -- using figure 1, what else do
we need to do by way of processing to get the analog signal
into a form that can be stored as digital data?
A After you've conditioned the analog signal in block 22, the
next thing to do is to convert it to digital.
After it's converted to digital, then it's ready to be
compressed. So that you use up less of your memory space in
that digital form, when it makes its way to the flash memory.
All of those steps are various forms of processing.
Q And at this time, when figure 1 was created, were you aware
of any technology that would allow you to convert analog
signals to digital data and to process it without using memory?
A No. Not possible.
Q And once the signal was processed with respect to figure 1,
then what would happen?
A That's one-half of the equation. The other half is that,
unlike RAM, which stores bits of memory, flash stores
information in discrete blocks.
Suppose you've made a recording but didn't fill up an
entire block. You start another recording or you want to maybe
erase the previous one. We had to deal with the issues of not
tossing a block away because it was filled with some
information from this recording and some information from
another recording.
So management of all that was new at the time to flash
memory. And we had to deal with that in order to efficiently
make use of this media called flash to be useful to us.
