The Business of Software

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a page that tracks the price of RAM (or other hardware) over the years?

I stumbled over a hardware price sheet from around 1990 - a 10Mb (MEG! Not Gig) SCSI harddrive would set you back $990!

My need: I'm faced with presenting to management that a server with 64Gb RAM is too expensive now but will be affordable in x years.

But figuring out that "x" is hard without historical data.

Any tips?
Thanks :)
Roark

www.dramexchange.com

Don't know how far back it goes.

Amazing what is out there.

Thanks 230V. Much appreciated
Roark

Here's a starting data point. In 1980, 1 Megabyte RAM was $13,000. Plot that on one end of a log scale and today's price on the other, take a straight edge and make a line from pt1 to pt2.

I'm not sure, but I think ISuppli track hardware prices

In 1980, I paid $850 for 32k of memory.

Don't forget inflation - it makes these price differences even larger.

OK, http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/InflationCalculator.asp#results says 160.17% between 1980 and today.

"says 160.17% between 1980 and today."

Home values are 400% since 1980...something is wrong somewhere.

In about 1985, paid £400 (UK pounds) for 128KB to upgrade our Amstrad PC1512 from 512KB to 640KB. This was to allow it to run the latest version of WordPerfect.

Back in 2000 or 2001 I got 512MB of RAM to upgrade my computer, which at the time put me into the highest allotment on a desktop machine for anyone I knew.  It was easily my most effective computer upgrade ever, and reasonably priced at ~$160.  It appears that you can now get that for ~$70, and that is not even an apples to apples comparison: my RAM was 100MHz (why I got it so cheap, right after most folks were switching to 130MHz and DDR had just come out), this RAM is DDR.

"Home values are 400% since 1980...something is wrong somewhere."

Well, and memory prices are 0.001% since 1980. The inflation number is the overall rate of increase of certain things. I don't think land prices are included in the calculation, nor is memory of a given size. But it is generally understood that when we talk of the overall inflation rate, it's an average, and does not apply to specific things.

BTW, home value in some places, like abandoned towns in the midwest, have dropped considerable since 1980. In some places, they have difficulty even giving away property for free.

Inflation number put out by the government is basically everything except those that people actually needs to live on.

It excludes oil, food, and you guessed it! housing. They say it's "volatile", another words, they are excluded because they go up.

Oh, and they use this trick that says, you paid more for your bling! but since they quality/speed is now 10 times as fast/better, your inflation in bling! actually went down, even though you now pay more for bling!

"BTW, home value in some places, like abandoned towns in the midwest, have dropped considerable since 1980. In some places, they have difficulty even giving away property for free."

Relatives own three empty houses, any one of which I could live in for free.  1500 mile commute though.  ;-)