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Historical memory prices 1960-2026

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Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#171

Post by account42 »

hackernudes wrote: post #38
abecedarius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you blame Moore's Law ending? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law looks steady up to the 2020s. 1979 to 2009 in the OP graph has a pretty steady drop from 10^7 to 10^1 USD/GB: 6 OOMs in 30 years. Then till before the recent spike it was around 1 OOM in 15 years: 1/3 the rate of progress on a log scale. When it comes to CPU progress we blame the end of Dennard scaling several years before the kn…

I am tickled that OOM can mean "out of memory" in another context. You clearly meant "orders of magnitude".

Well if you underestimate your memory requirements by orders of magnitude you'll be out of memory for sure.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#172

Post by account42 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #137
bpavuk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but you also have commercial licensing with Qt specifically :)) or we are going to see an explosion of vibe-coded GPL apps. anyhow, the likes of Linear and Notion ain't gonna abandon web and go Qt. or!! if we are very lucky, we can see a native app framework that ticks all the boxes of a modern UI framework and is permissively licensed, but we need this crunch to stay there for years.

> you also have commercial licensing with Qt That doesn't apply so long as you are willing to accept the LGPL. In practice that means you can statically link everything except QT so that the end user is free to drop in a modified QT version if he would like.

You can even statically link QT if you really need to as long as you dump the unlinked objects on some server somewhere.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#173

Post by account42 »

Gigachad wrote: post #76
IshKebab wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going up is worse though because software has gradually got less and less memory efficient.

It'll get more efficient now people aren't upgrading. Software will be exactly as efficient as it needs to be to run on most peoples computers.

I don't think that's true - instead software will be exactly as efficient as it needs to be to run on the developers workstations. And companies throwing sky high salaries at software developers aren't as price sensitive when it comes to those workstations as the average user.

Re: Historical memory prices 1960-2026

#174

Post by sreekanth67 »

codingdave wrote: post #25
fernly wrote: post #3

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…

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.

I am curious. which year was it ? also which boat.
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