April 16, 2001
The price of RAM

I was going through some paper work when I saw this old receipt:



IF you can't read it clearly, it shows I bought two sticks of 8 Meg 60 ns RAM for $87.09 each in 1996.

An 8 Meg stick of RAM for 87.09. That's $10.89 per Meg of RAM in 1996.

Today, according to www.pricewatch.com, a stick of 256 Meg of PC133 RAM costs $42. That's $0.16 per Meg of RAM in 2001.

The cost of RAM in 2001 is 1.5% of the cost in 1996.

If we do the math and extrapolate the RAM cost per Meg out 5 more years, we see that RAM will cost $0.0025 per Meg.

That means that a Gigabyte of RAM should cost $2.50 in 2006.

I figure that people are willing to spend about $50 on RAM for their computer. R33t hardware dewds (like me) willspend much more, but the average person will spend $50.

In 2006, $50 should buy you 20 Gigs of RAM. It boggles the mind...

Posted by michael at April 16, 2001 07:22 AM