A ROM cartridge is a type of media storage device.

Today we've got solid state hard drives and just about everything,

and wireless connections to back up all of our stuff onto the cloud, onto computers elsewhere

in the world that we can tap into on-demand. But back in the day, even before DVDs, even before

CD-ROMs, we had cartridges. ROM stands for read-only memory,

meaning you typically couldn't write to this memory after it was produced. You could only get

data from it. Modern definitions of ROM include types of memory that are typically read-only

on a day-to-day basis, but which can, at times, also be reprogrammed

later, if necessary. The boot disk on your computer is ROM memory, so the part of your

internal memory that holds the operating system and other even deeper level programs,

that's the sort of thing that we had in these cartridges. And part of why they were so

popular at this time is that they allowed folks with early computers to have the benefits of a floppy

drive, a drive that could read floppy diskettes without needing to have the drive or the disks. You

could essentially plug in a separate ROM drive, just like the one that was

housed inside of your computer, running your operating system, and then move that drive from

computer to computer. It allowed, in other words, for the hot swapping of media that would be

tricky to distribute using any other contemporary mechanism. Fast forward a bit to the late 70s and we see Texas

instruments, an oft underappreciated innovator in the world of electronics, in my opinion,

using tiny ROM cartridges to add new functionality and all sorts of programs to their

TI 59 line of programmable calculators.

Hewlett-Packard did the same with their line of programmable calculators,

including the HP 41C a few years later.

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