Price of RAM - how it's changed!

[#1]

Ordered 8 gig of RAM from Crucial last night - £62.38!
A lot of years (when Windows 3 ran on 4 megs) ago I bought 16 megs for £330!
That makes the cost of RAM less than a penny(?) a meg today, versus about £20 way back when!
Someone please check the calcs 'cos it's unbelievable. 

[#2]

I used to sell 4Mb RAM Upgrades for £129 many moons ago (around 1994/95)
Windows / Office would run on a machine with 4Mb Ram and would absolutely fly on 8Mb
Some of the first machines I sold had no hard drive but there was an option for a 20Mb hard drive and laser printers started off at around £1000+vat for the most basic one.

[#3]

Those would perhaps be DSG prices 

[#4]

Yup - you could walking in, pick some off the shelf and pop it into your machine.
Some of the stuff was competitively priced but a lot of it had a fair bit of markup on.
These days retailers are selling goods with single figure margins just to try and compete with the mail order companies. Even when I was working for them back in the mid 90's, some PC's would come in with a 5-6% margin. Often, a pack of printer cartridges, disks,  some paper and a mouse mat would create more profit than the rest of the sale 

[#5]

My 16 megs was bought at a Computer Fair (remember those?) on Tyneside!  
As near as I can figure it this would have been about 20/25 years ago!

[#6]

Quote from: NedLudd

Ordered 8 gig of RAM from Crucial last night - £62.38!

my word it's got expensive again.. i paid half that a couple of years ago from crucial..

[#7]

I was just thinking that. I'm sure I paid around £80 for 16GB (2x8GB) of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM a year or so back.

[#8]

A stick of 4GB DDR3 from Crucial last month £29.99.

[#9]

Not sure how much the 12kb of hand-threaded magnetic core memory cost on the IBM 1440 I learned on in '65, but I think probably a few thousand pounds.  I'm sure it was cheaper than the memory in its predecessors.

[#10]

I was thinking how memory intensive applications were these days when I saw Internet Explorer hog 300+Mb of memory when opened on a single web page.
300Mb of memory is twice what I had in hard drive storage on my first PC (which had 6Mb Ram !). We could use Office, Desktop publishing was no issue and it felt pretty rapid.
I'm used to squeezing programs into 8-16K of program space with the PIC Microcontrollers I use so know what is possible with very little memory but it seems the more RAM computers have these days, the more slovenly the programming and the more resources the newer applications seem to hog.

[#11]

The first PC I used was one of these: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/733/amstrad-pc1640-hd20/

[#12]

Quote from: DomS

I'm used to squeezing programs into 8-16K of program space.

16kB was the maximum official memory expansion on my first 'computer' a Sinclair ZX80, some of my programs would run in the basic 1kB, no idea now how much my 16kB cost...

[#13]

Quote from: sjptd

Not sure how much the 12kb of hand-threaded magnetic core memory cost on the IBM 1440 I learned on in '65, but I think probably a few thousand pounds.  I'm sure it was cheaper than the memory in its predecessors.

Brings back memories. The first machine I wrote production code for had 8k of 12 bit words of memory and a 32k (12 bit words) hard drive.  We ran the monitoring, measurement and control system  for a TV tube (remember those) production line on it. The system including the analogue I/0 cost tens of thousands - the project paid back in a few  weeks when we went live.

[#14]

the first pc I bought myself was a 486sx with the maths co processor and came with 4mb of ram and a 40mb hdd, when I was looking to upgrade it the parts were more expensive than a new pc tower, a few years later I bought a Cyrix 686 mmx200 system (from time computers) which cost less than 8mb of ram and a 4gb hdd for the 486 would of done,  a year after buying it I got a new hdd (10gb) and upgraded the ram from 64mb to 2 x 128mb which cost about 400 quid.
jump forward to 5 months ago and I managed ot get 4 x 2TB hdd's and 4 x 8GB ram for under 400 quid, strangely I still have the same account with crucial that I opened nearly 20 years ago and it still has all the order details ....

[#15]

Quote from: w23

16kB was the maximum official memory expansion on my first 'computer' a Sinclair ZX80, some of my programs would run in the basic 1kB, no idea now how much my 16kB cost...

When I bought my Spectrum in 1982 it was £175 for the 48k jobbie. The 16k one was £125!
So, the extra 32k cost £50! Someone tell me how much a meg that was!