61–70 of 175 posts
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…
Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS
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…
Back then was it 1000KB or 1024KB?
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.
A perfect example of how graphs are often misleading. $/GB is a totally useless unit value because it's an arbitrary size. The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time. The y axis should be something like $/average workstation memory or $/requirement for common compute task. It's obvious that ram is expensive right now, but it's not expensive per GB. It's expensive relative to what you need to ac…
A useful task isn't a fixed thing though. Everything the 2012 computer did you can still do today with the same amount of ram we had back then.
The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A useful task isn't a fixed thing though. Everything the 2012 computer did you can still do today with the same amount of ram we had back then.
No, not if it involves a web browser. Most web sites today will not work on a 2012 web browser. The PC stopped existing in isolation, for most useful tasks now, it needs an Internet connection.
We don't _need_ that much ram, we just found new things to do with more.
If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each. Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS
But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.
If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each. Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS
I think it would be better if one has the discipline to just use older machines and play older games and only visit certain websites that can be visited on older version of browsers. A second-hand 16GB laptop can go a long way. But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.