3 ms·

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 m

by kragen 11mo ago

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-12/page/n14/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today. So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year. That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%. Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.

antisthenes 11mo ago
> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today. Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it. Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser. What does your math say about that?
- adrianN 11mo ago
  You can still run software from 1987 on a megabyte of ram, it just does different things from a modern browser.
- kragen 11mo ago
  Math says that's stupid. You can still do everything with a "meg" of RAM that you could do in 01987. In fact, the "meg" of RAM you get now is enormously faster, and you can interface it to other things that you couldn't get at the time, such as SSDs, so you can do strictly more with it. Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.

by kragen 11mo ago

antisthenes 11mo ago

> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today. Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it. Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser. What does your math say about that?

adrianN 11mo ago
You can still run software from 1987 on a megabyte of ram, it just does different things from a modern browser.
kragen 11mo ago
Math says that's stupid. You can still do everything with a "meg" of RAM that you could do in 01987. In fact, the "meg" of RAM you get now is enormously faster, and you can interface it to other things that you couldn't get at the time, such as SSDs, so you can do strictly more with it. Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.