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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.erols.net!news1.erols.com!news From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Are memory prices going up??? Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 20:04:31 +0000 Organization: Erol's Internet Services Lines: 54 Message-ID: <322C8F4F.676A@www.play-hookey.com> References: <32255CD3.41C67EA6@bnr.ca> <505523$g1@anorak.coverform.lan> <SCOTT.96Sep2115927@crux.dcs.qmw.ac.uk> Reply-To: kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com NNTP-Posting-Host: kenjb05.play-hookey.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win16; U) Scott Mitchell wrote: > > In article <505523$g1@anorak.coverform.lan> brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers) writes: > > > The (previous) problem with SIMMs was that they had a high fatality rate. > > About 1 in 4 SIMMs were bad (difficult to produce for some reason) and as > > a result, buying one SIMM cost four or more times the "should be" cost. > > > > Some bright spark then came up with the idea of building in some redundancy > > into the SIMM along with a bit of intelligence - similar to SCSI disks > > reserving some blocks at the end for relocating bad blocks. > > Now, all the "old" memory has been sold and everyone is getting the benefit > > of this guys idea. > > > > I'm sure someone else can be more specific - that's all the detail I know. > > I don't believe that prices are gonna up again. > > > > -- > > Brian <brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk> > > Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour.... > > Hmmm, a fair number of the SIMMs I've encountered lately have been > faulty. AFAIK, most ICs have a ridiculously high failure rate, but > usually they test them and discard the broken ones *before* shipping > them out to thee and me. They are cheap to produce in bulk so a 50% > failure rate is probably no big deal. Perhaps this is an extension of > the MS philosophy of letting the users find the bugs.... > > I thought that the sudden crash in memory prices was a result of a big > decrease in demand when a lot of people figured out that Winblows 95 > is not the answer to everything and maybe they didn't need to upgrade > their machines after all. There was also a fire in a resin plant > somewhere a few years back that manufacturers claimed was keeping > prices up. Ignoring the fact that RAM has been shockingly expensive > for as long as I can remember. > > Whatever the reason, lets hope RAM prices stay where they are :) > Just to toss my chip into the pot: this past Sunday (9/1) I went to a local computer show and picked up some 16 MB SIMMS (4 x 32, no parity, 60 ns), tested on site, right in front of me, at $79.00 each. This included the last two EDO SIMMS he had. I've been running them with no trouble so far. Before anybody asks me "Where....," I'm in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. However, I'm sure similar shows go on all over. -- Ken Are you interested in | byte-sized education | http://www.play-hookey.com over the Internet? |