4 ms·

Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcu

by baz00 3y ago

Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcuffed to himself because it was that valuable.

smcameron 3y ago
I worked in a shop in the early 90s with a bunch of Suns, and we had hired this new sysadmin. One day we noticed that half the RAM was missing from a workstation, and few minutes later noticed half the RAM was missing from all the workstations. Turned out the new sysadmin was a cokehead and had stolen it.
- baz00 3y ago
  Oh man that's funny. Only because something similar happened to us. Hired new cleaners circa 2001. Got into the office one morning and all the PC cases were open. All the RAM and CPUs had been stolen.
  - Trixter 3y ago
    In the mid-90s, when CPU heatsinks didn't need to be screwed in, thieves discovered that the new ZIF/zero-insertion-force sockets also make good zero-removal-force sockets.
13of40 3y ago
When I was in Korea in the 90s you could get LG RAM for about half what it would cost in the US. I had a scheme to buy a bunch of it to sell when I came home, but in retrospect it would have been the nerdiest case of "guy goes door to door trying to sell rapidly expiring meat".
K0balt 3y ago
This brings back memories. I got my start in parts wholesale selling 30pin SIMMs in static baggies out of my leather jacket in a Taco Bell LMFAO. It took some convincing to convince the management I wasn’t selling drugs, but the getup helped me to not be noticed by people that might otherwise know that I was carrying thousands of dollars in cash and chips daily. I would sit there and wait for RAM hungry customers that would call me on my 3 lb cellphone lol. Each one has to buy at least a $0.39 taco so I wouldn’t get kicked out by the manager. They had armed security, who I tipped 20 dollars a day. I hung fliers all over town with tear-off tabs. Then I went to COMDEX, it changed my life. Within 2 years I was in my early 20s and moving 2-3 million in hardware a year. It was a heady time. Then, the business dried up overnight with online sales. Fortunately I saw that coming and had moved into technical services and contracting, and sold the parts wholesale business to one of my competitors lol. The local wholesale distribution biz was dead within 8 months.
- baz00 3y ago
  Hahaha hooky RAM dealer. Much respect though for being there at the start. I used to do something similar with pirated Amiga games but that was a limited market!
  - K0balt 3y ago
    At first, it was an opportunistic grift by a teenager looking for party money. As prices fell rapidly at the supply level, local box stores would occasionally sell off stock at deep discounts (reflecting the real market price). Being a teenage sociopath, I would buy every last bit of it in town and then coast on the uninformed price perception for a week or two. Prices were falling so fast at that time that the stores were always wrong footed, so I was able to keep up that racket long enough to get to the bottom of that mechanism and start ordering in bulk directly from city of industry California. Place was called Ma labs, iirc. After that it was obvious to start moving disk drives, video cards, processors, and later everything else too. I was just exploiting basic market inefficiencies , since the only other sources were the big box stores that were constantly 2-4 months behind the price curve. Then COMDEX happened. It got me tied directly in to motherboard and peripheral card manufacturers. I also got introduced to the cocaine and extremely friendly booth-girl shmoozefest, and NGL for naive Alaskan me it was heady stuff. The real deals and the points negotiations were made in the afterparties with piles of coke and very persuasive “account representatives”. Memorable times were had in the hedonistic environment of an exploding industry. At that time there were a lot of small manufacturers in industrial parks. They were usually pretty small outfits usually just a shop with a few hot air stations for warranty work and a wave soldering table, 15-20 employees at jet labs, for example, which was one of our big suppliers of motherboards, video cards, modems, lan, and other peripheral cards. My activity festered a plague of tiny pc builders selling systems, and launched the careers of at least 50 technicians and small businesses. We used to put on big public LAN parties and public PC repair clinics as promotions for our “dealers”. I worked with a training/testing outfit to get new dealers A+ certification to reduce the damage to society and actually grew into a semi responsible citizen during that time. Fond memories but I’m glad to leave that hustle behind. After that, I unwittingly became a software developer for a major criminal organisation. I thought they were a car dealership, but gradually it became apparent as I built out their backend that the dealership was just a small part of a very large laundromat. It took me years to extricate myself from that and for years afterwards they would give me gentle reminders that they were keeping an eye on me. Free 500 dollar an hour lawyer’s though. They never let me get near a courtroom or a police interaction without “proper” representation showing up even for years afterwards (statute of limitations?) The fact that they always knew when I brushed up against the legal system in any small way, even traffic tickets in rental cars, gave me great respect for the scope of their concern. That and their obvious love for mid range turbine helicopters. I was probably lucky to leave that alive.

by baz00 3y ago

smcameron 3y ago

I worked in a shop in the early 90s with a bunch of Suns, and we had hired this new sysadmin. One day we noticed that half the RAM was missing from a workstation, and few minutes later noticed half the RAM was missing from all the workstations. Turned out the new sysadmin was a cokehead and had stolen it.

baz00 3y ago
Oh man that's funny. Only because something similar happened to us. Hired new cleaners circa 2001. Got into the office one morning and all the PC cases were open. All the RAM and CPUs had been stolen.
- Trixter 3y ago
  In the mid-90s, when CPU heatsinks didn't need to be screwed in, thieves discovered that the new ZIF/zero-insertion-force sockets also make good zero-removal-force sockets.

13of40 3y ago

When I was in Korea in the 90s you could get LG RAM for about half what it would cost in the US. I had a scheme to buy a bunch of it to sell when I came home, but in retrospect it would have been the nerdiest case of "guy goes door to door trying to sell rapidly expiring meat".

K0balt 3y ago

This brings back memories. I got my start in parts wholesale selling 30pin SIMMs in static baggies out of my leather jacket in a Taco Bell LMFAO. It took some convincing to convince the management I wasn’t selling drugs, but the getup helped me to not be noticed by people that might otherwise know that I was carrying thousands of dollars in cash and chips daily. I would sit there and wait for RAM hungry customers that would call me on my 3 lb cellphone lol. Each one has to buy at least a $0.39 taco so I wouldn’t get kicked out by the manager. They had armed security, who I tipped 20 dollars a day. I hung fliers all over town with tear-off tabs. Then I went to COMDEX, it changed my life. Within 2 years I was in my early 20s and moving 2-3 million in hardware a year. It was a heady time. Then, the business dried up overnight with online sales. Fortunately I saw that coming and had moved into technical services and contracting, and sold the parts wholesale business to one of my competitors lol. The local wholesale distribution biz was dead within 8 months.

baz00 3y ago
Hahaha hooky RAM dealer. Much respect though for being there at the start. I used to do something similar with pirated Amiga games but that was a limited market!
- K0balt 3y ago
  At first, it was an opportunistic grift by a teenager looking for party money. As prices fell rapidly at the supply level, local box stores would occasionally sell off stock at deep discounts (reflecting the real market price). Being a teenage sociopath, I would buy every last bit of it in town and then coast on the uninformed price perception for a week or two. Prices were falling so fast at that time that the stores were always wrong footed, so I was able to keep up that racket long enough to get to the bottom of that mechanism and start ordering in bulk directly from city of industry California. Place was called Ma labs, iirc. After that it was obvious to start moving disk drives, video cards, processors, and later everything else too. I was just exploiting basic market inefficiencies , since the only other sources were the big box stores that were constantly 2-4 months behind the price curve. Then COMDEX happened. It got me tied directly in to motherboard and peripheral card manufacturers. I also got introduced to the cocaine and extremely friendly booth-girl shmoozefest, and NGL for naive Alaskan me it was heady stuff. The real deals and the points negotiations were made in the afterparties with piles of coke and very persuasive “account representatives”. Memorable times were had in the hedonistic environment of an exploding industry. At that time there were a lot of small manufacturers in industrial parks. They were usually pretty small outfits usually just a shop with a few hot air stations for warranty work and a wave soldering table, 15-20 employees at jet labs, for example, which was one of our big suppliers of motherboards, video cards, modems, lan, and other peripheral cards. My activity festered a plague of tiny pc builders selling systems, and launched the careers of at least 50 technicians and small businesses. We used to put on big public LAN parties and public PC repair clinics as promotions for our “dealers”. I worked with a training/testing outfit to get new dealers A+ certification to reduce the damage to society and actually grew into a semi responsible citizen during that time. Fond memories but I’m glad to leave that hustle behind. After that, I unwittingly became a software developer for a major criminal organisation. I thought they were a car dealership, but gradually it became apparent as I built out their backend that the dealership was just a small part of a very large laundromat. It took me years to extricate myself from that and for years afterwards they would give me gentle reminders that they were keeping an eye on me. Free 500 dollar an hour lawyer’s though. They never let me get near a courtroom or a police interaction without “proper” representation showing up even for years afterwards (statute of limitations?) The fact that they always knew when I brushed up against the legal system in any small way, even traffic tickets in rental cars, gave me great respect for the scope of their concern. That and their obvious love for mid range turbine helicopters. I was probably lucky to leave that alive.