by fernly 7 hours ago
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 unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."
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.
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.
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.
I still don't get where all that memory goes.
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.
For windows 11, it seesms to be antivirus scanning. That's what's always blowing up my RAM
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.
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.
[dead]
Also maybe you want price per average program footprint size...
The graph wouldn't be a lot taller because it's using a logarithmic scale
Back then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?
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 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.
IIRC the Cray 2 was offered in a 1GB configuration by the mid 80s.