14 replies to this topic

[exvirilis]

I'm not really a techie so forgive what may be an obvious question to many, but I've just bought a PC and upgraded the Ram from 1Gb to 2Gb and it cost an extra £100. However, if I buy a memory stick with 1Gb, it's only £10. Are PC manufacturers making an exhorbitant profit, or is internal Ram for PCs more expensive to manufacture than memory stick memory?

[cnm]

It's almost always cheaper to buy your RAM from a vendor other than the PC manufacturer. In exchange for saving some money, you have to make sure that the speed and size of the RAM are supported by your motherboard, and have to do the installation yourself.

[Dragonslore]

If you think memory is expensive now, you should see how much it cost back in the mid 90's.

In early 1995, my wife bought me 4 Megs of memory for my computer as a gift. At the time, we were not yet married. Well, the other day I found the invoice while going through some old papers we had saved. The invoice didn't say how many stick were purchased. only listed how much memory and the type, but I'm fairly certain it was four memory sticks.

Early 1995

(4) - 1 MB SIMMs @ $640.oo US Dollars and that doesn't include the 5% sales tax in my state.

Later that same year towards the fall season, it was much cheaper, although it was still expensive at over $50.oo per Meg

[exvirilis]

ta

I've gone for 2gb and if I feel I need 4gb I'll get that later.

V excited to get my new DX10 card!

[hornet777]

unit cost has definitely dropped (per MB) but that doesn't mean ya still can't get ripped-off; then there is the question of the ever-expanding technologies to implement solid-state memory as well, which influences cost.

Wow dragonslore, I thought the $150 I paid for 4MB was ridiculous in the mid-90s...

[Dragonslore]

The price of memory was fluctuating so much back then that the price depended a lot on when you purchased it.

Then again, in 1995, memory prices dropped drastically. So if my wife had held off a few weeks, she could have saved a few hundred dollars.

[Budfred]

I bought my first computer in '86 or '87 and paid a premium price, I believe it was a few hundred dollars more, because it came with a whole MEGABYTE of RAM... Quite the splurge at the time... Of course, it didn't have a hard drive...

[jedi]

I bought my first computer in '86 or '87

Did it look like this?
[attachment=1681:attachment]

[TheJoker]

Hmmm.... Jedi's computer may have been even before ferrite core memory?

Buy a computer with a MB or RAM? I still remember buying that FULL LENGTH proprietary memory expansion board to populate with individual memory chips (don't bend the legs) to get that 1 MB of RAM in the 10 MHz 286, and eventually using EMM 386 from Quarterdeck Software to load programs into upper memory. Ahhhh.... the good old days, when that new US Robotics HST modem would set you back a grand if you didn't qualify for a sysop deal.

[AlexBrown]

The answer to your question is that RAM memory and the memory on your memory stick are different kinds of memory. Kind of like the memory in your HDD and your RAM are different kinds of memory. One memory is for storing files and stuff like that (HDD & Memory Stick) The other works directly with your processor for storing programs while they are running.

A quick example to show the diference is that if you open My PC, you can see how much HDD space you have used. And if you open task manager, you can see how much RAM memory is used. This is why a HDD with 300 GB of memory cost about the same as a kingston RAM stick with 1 GB.

[Budfred]

Did it look like this?

It was a little smaller than that... It did have 2 5.25 inch floppies as the means of loading programs and, of course, ran DOS...

[hornet777]

the evolution of memory techniques is interesting in itself

joker mentions ferrites, but there were magnetic drums and even specialised CRTs as well. lotsa PDFs are still around, describing this stuff, with a lil digging...

probably the most challenging I found were von Neumann's preliminary and final EDVAC papers; the language at that time to describe what he was doing was lacking, so he had to invent it, and I had to rely mostly on my elementary digital building blocks mini-tut from high school to decipher it.

can anyone imagine the challenge of building a working ALU out of tubes?

still he anticipated things like fanout and the role of bandwidth, and even though he seemigly came up short on the actual architecture, he did the best he could with what existed then I suppose: it beat a mechanical equivalent device, which is all that existed prior

[Indrid_Cold]

Did someone say TUBES? Ted Stevens would be so proud!
http://www.youtube.c...s...ted&search=

[screen317]

Did someone say TUBES? Ted Stevens would be so proud!
http://www.youtube.c...s...ted&search=

[hornet777]

Did someone say TUBES? Ted Stevens would be so proud!
http://www.youtube.c...s...ted&search=