6 ms·

Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is un

• levocardia 3mo ago
  Yes, you really need "dollars per amount of RAM you need for standard computing tasks." Windows 11 requires a bare minimum of 4 GB of RAM, Window 10 only needed 1 GB.
  • ElFitz 3mo ago
    I still don't get where all that memory goes.
    • microgpt 3mo ago
      Abstractions on abstractions on abstractions; background tasks and their abstraction stacks; increased cache and buffer sizes to take advantage of increased typical memory capacity. For an example of the latter, handling TCP on a Commodore 64 is a problem because the memory can only fit about 45 packets with nothing left over, but now you can just allocate a megabyte receive buffer per connection.
    • xeromal 3mo ago
      For windows 11, it seesms to be antivirus scanning. That's what's always blowing up my RAM
    • skywhopper 3mo ago
      Neither do the developers, because until recently, RAM was so cheap it didn’t matter, and we were in a situation where almost no one ever needed to consider “how much RAM will this take?” when writing code.
      • cryptonym 3mo ago
        More than code they write, the framework and runtime they use.
      • crottypeter 3mo ago
        Like Homer Simpson said about alcohol: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems", we developers can say about AI (assuming AI-assisted coding can save memory in popular programs, OSes, etc)
    • cryptonym 3mo ago
      Mostly used by JavaScript parsers and HTML rendering, the rest is for telemetry.
  • noosphr 3mo ago
    That's just as wrong in the opposite direction, y2k was a thing because two bytes were worth the saving in 1980, and we really needed those two bytes.
    • microgpt 3mo ago
      [dead]
    • Dylan16807 3mo ago
      Well it's complicated. Y2K was a combination of logic issues and the consequences of certain inefficient ways to store dates, like text and BCD. Migrating to binary could fit plenty of dates into the same space or even less. In particular, 16 bits is enough to store the entire date, year month day, from 1900 into mid 2079. Any date format that couldn't go past 1999 was probably using 24-48 bits.
  • fc417fc802 3mo ago
    If what you're interested in is fluctuations in production versus demand then you absolutely do not want a subjective metric. Measures of the form dollars per unit, units per watt, units per flop, etc are what you're interested in.
    • __patchbit__ 3mo ago
      Discussion of memory in terms of words and their bit length, time to complete a task is more meaningful to intent on use and compaction, see greycode technique. Dollars of slop a unit sacrifice skills in the industrial base for the gain of paper profits at the repeating business meetings.
  • ryukoposting 3mo ago
    Have you ever actually tried using Windows 10 with 1GB of RAM? I wouldn't consider it suitable for "standard computing tasks." And that's the hangup, what do you consider a "standard computing task?" On what OS? Running what software? How well? Plenty of people were still using XP in 2009, so is 256 MB of RAM okay for "standard computing tasks" in 2009?
    • gucci-on-fleek 3mo ago
      > Have you ever actually tried using Windows 10 with 1GB of RAM? I wouldn't consider it suitable for "standard computing tasks." I have [0], and it's actually not quite as bad as you would expect. It certainly wasn't fast, but I had no problem using it for basic web browsing and document editing. The painfully slow hard drive and processor speeds on that computer actually caused more issues than the lack of RAM. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066
      • ryukoposting 3mo ago
        I remember installing Windows 10 on my laptop when I was in high school, it was a decommissioned Thinkpad T410s from my dad's work. 4GB of RAM, Nehalem i5, a very early consumer SSD (OCZ, if I recall). I vividly remember my first thought being "wow this is really slow." Win7 ran like a champ on that machine. My experience with Win10 on that laptop actually led me to buy a dumb gamer laptop for college. As those all do, it died prematurely, so I ended up back on the T410s for a while. I put KDE Neon on it. It was great! If you're saying that you can install and use Win10 on a laptop with 1 GB of RAM, well yes I acknowledge that is true. But it's a purely academic exercise, it's not actually a usable computer for the overwhelming majority of people. Maybe it would have been fine for my grandma. She was using a Pentium II running Windows XP to go on Facebook in the early 2010s.
  • aaron695 3mo ago
    [dead]
• crest 3mo ago
  IIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.
• codingdave 3mo ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to say "nobody". Electric Boat had 2 GB memory in one of its systems at that time, with the hardware capacity to increase to 4 GB. It sounded insane at the time, but it absolutely existed, and thereby seems reasonable to include it in any research of historical pricing.
  • sreekanth67 3mo ago
    I am curious. which year was it ? also which boat.
• mcdonje 3mo ago
  The graph wouldn't be a lot taller because it's using a logarithmic scale
• rootsudo 3mo ago
  Back then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?
  • mjevans 3mo ago
    The natural unit of measure for integrated circuits is a power of 2 since that's what the systems operate in. It's so natural that early 9 and 36 bit architectures were squeezed into 8 and 32 bits as it just works so much more efficiently. Long term storage and communications? Those start to introduce things like human division of timings, frequencies, and other analog systems like rotating disks. It still generally makes sense fab actual flash chips in various powers of 2 though. The discrepancy there tends to be various forms of 'overhead' for the translation table / wear level indirection, over-provisioning, and even variations in density caused by different levels of physical cell utilization. Still, most network stuff ships around packets of 'up to' 1500 bytes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame and lets just exclude jumbo frames ) so arguably it'd be better to talk about all computer measures in binary powers of two, exclude the marketing huckster trying to make things more impressive by shoehorning SI engineering units into a realm that uses binary math.
• pishpash 3mo ago
  Also maybe you want price per average program footprint size...
• raincole 3mo ago
  > adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. It won't though. One dollar in 1960 is just about ten dollars today. The graph is already in logarithmic scale so it won't make much difference.
  • __patchbit__ 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • sb057 3mo ago
      What? Gold underwent a massive revaluation with the end of Bretton Woods in 1971. It was prior to then that government were actively involved in making the price of gold artificially low. Fun fact: under 31 U.S. Code § 5117 a troy ounce of gold is still valued at 42 and 2/9ths dollars.
      • applicative 3mo ago
        Gold became much ‘cheaper’ in the period 1945-70 because there was a series of technical revolutions in South Africa mining (never mind the apartheid …) This is why Breton Woods lasted as long as it did. The countries like France that conspired in resentment to break it as ‘privilege’ are now effectively in flames.
      • qingcharles 3mo ago
        The right to a civil jury trial in the 7th Amend. to the US Constitution is only available where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars (a massive sum in 1791, and a trifle now).
    • hylaride 3mo ago
      You got it backwards; ending the gold standard was very much a unilateral decision by the United States because Nixon couldn't handle making politically unpopular decisions to cut spending and/or end the Vietnam war. Many countries that had their gold reserves held via US dollars were livid.
    • 3mo ago
• imtringued 3mo ago
  The Cray-2 had 2GB of RAM in 1985.
  • pastage 3mo ago
    So total system cost per unit of memory is going up.. 2GB costs in 1985 was $2 million (from the graph), a cray-2 was $16 million (from wikipedia). A GPU server with 8xB200 today can be had for ~$500k (estimate), 1.5TB memory is $25k (from the graph).
    • sehansen 3mo ago
      Hmm, so memory is actually still cheap compared to historical highs. At least cheap relative to other computer components.
• aaron695 3mo ago
  [dead]
• Tade0 3mo ago
  I once held in my hand the main part of a ferrite core memory module from the early 70s. It was kilobytes at best. I also recall looking at recommended requirements for Dungeon Keeper 2 - 266MHz CPU, 64MB RAM and thinking "that's absurd - no such device exists!". I was a kid back then, so what did I know? Later on in college a friend showed us his absolute monster of a laptop with a whopping 8GB of RAM - he could spin up several VMs on one device! Groundbreaking on a (nominally) portable device. So yeah, safe to say the notion of gigabytes of RAM anywhere close to a regular person belongs firmly to the 21st century.
• quietbritishjim 3mo ago
  The author clearly wasn't implying that these were 1GB chips. They just wanted to show a graph scaled per unit of memory. It could just as well have been per byte, and the graph would've been identical but the values on the left would be changed by a factor of a billion. You could argue that you'd rather see a "price per typical-sized RAM chip as sold at the time". That would also be a perfectly valid thing to graph (though a bit more subjective), but it doesn't invalidate this one. Since per byte (or GB or whatever you want to say) has continued downward all this time, it makes the recent spike all the more notable. (I'm not sure it's right to label vacuum tubes and core memory as "DRAM" though.)
  • toast0 3mo ago
    > I'm not sure it's right to label vacuum tubes and core memory as "DRAM" though. Core memory does need a refresh after a read, but since it doesn't need refreshing otherwise, I'd mark it as SRAM. Williams tube memories seem DRAM like enough to me though.
  • ralferoo 3mo ago
    The problem with "price per typical-sized RAM chip as sold at the time" is not so much that it's subjective, but you'd get artificial spikes in the data. For me, the key take home from the graph as stands is that price per GB right now is about the same as 2020. That seems reasonable, it's more expensive than it was, but only outrageous if you forget what it was like only a short while ago. But back in 2020, 4GB or 8GB sticks were most common, a few years ago it was up to 8GB, 16GB or 32GB, and now 2x8GB seems to be the most common high-end configuration or 2x4GB for low-end again. If you'd jumped from 8GB sticks to 32GB sticks and back again, it would seem like there was a spike up around 2021-2 and that memory was cheaper now than a few years ago. I think the main driver for the data is that probably consumers or the market decides on a reasonable price for memory, and people buy whatever they can get for that money. When I had a Z80 computer in the mid 80s, 64KB expansion RAM was about £100. For a similar computer but a few years earlier, a 32KB expansion RAM was about the same price. When I had an Amiga in the early 90s, a 512KB expansion RAM was again around the same price. In the 2000s, a couple of MB was around the same price. Maybe 5 years ago, the market was split a bit and a 4GB RAM was around £60 and 8GB around £120, but maybe this reflects "under $100" as the ideal target. A few years ago, it was similar but 8GB for around £80 and 16GB for around £160, now it's "doubled" in price, it's just back to 8GB for £120 again. But whatever the decade, it seems people are prepared to spend about £100 on memory for an average PC.