There's an interesting tale related to this that occurred in 1993. On July 4th 1993 a plant that made epoxy resin for semiconductor packaging in Japan exploded

There's an interesting tale related to this that occurred in 1993. On July 4th 1993 a plant that made epoxy resin for semiconductor packaging in Japan exploded and was destroyed by fire. As a consequence there was a significant spike in DRAM prices that summer. I happen to remember this specifically as that summer as I was on a one month work term at a software house where I got to work on the POSIX environment running under VMS on a DEC Alpha. My task was to get their test suites runing on the Alpha (mostly a bunch of shell scripts). When I went to purchase a couple of SIMMs to upgrade the memory of my Amiga, the prices had more than doubled relative to the month before. A year or two after that low profile DRAM packages started to show up in SIMMs that had no more than a millimeter of height to reduce the amount of epoxy used in each chip.