One gigabyte of RAM cost as much as a house back in 1995 — $64,000 price tag resurfaced in 31-year-old press release, equivalent to $140,000 today
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One gigabyte of RAM cost as much as a house back in 1995 — $64,000 price tag resurfaced in 31-year-old press release, equivalent to $140,000 today By the looks of it, we're going back to that pricing, too. Looking back in time is always interesting, especially when visiting any topic that's technology-adjacent — and doubly so when looking at the evolution of pricing. The price of memory continues to be a hot-button topic, and an eagle-eyed Redditor came across a 1995 press release from Advantage Memory Corporation announcing prices for its freshly released DIMMs, revealing that fitting a high-end machine with 1 GB of RAM would set you back as much as a cheap house. The figures on display are rather shocking when converted to today's dollars, with 8 MB of RAM going for $399, or $874 in today's money, and a 64 MB stick ringing in at $3,900, or $8,540 in 2026. The Apple Power Macintosh mentioned in the PR had 12 slots, so it could fit in as much as 1.5 GB of RAM, and although the pricing for 128 MB DIMMs wasn't mentioned, those would be around $8,000 a pop, so "only" 1 GB of RAM would come in at $64,000 — enough for a house back then in the more affordable areas of the U.S. By the way, that amount would be $140,000 today. In 1995, memory technology was transitioning from SIMMs to the spankin' new DIMMs, and Command and Conquer, MechWarrior 2, and the original Need for Speed were coming out. 16 MB of RAM was generally accepted as a decent amount of memory for a build, roughly matching the 16 GB of today. Some quick math says those 16 MB of the new technology were about $800, or in today's money, the princely sum of $1,751. As of today, 16 GB of DDR5 will set you back $200 to $250, but the price of memory has been extremely volatile, to say the least. Plus, not only is supply rumored to drop, server RAM contract prices are expected to rise, and the few crumbs left for the consumer market are still rising in price. SK hynix chairman Chey Tae-won even suggested that DRAM wafer shortages could last until 2030 at least. The fact that all the major RAM makers are shifting their production lines to HBM for AI accelerators is only making the problem worse. Yes, $200 is still a long way from $1,750, but with things keeping in this direction, there's a non-zero chance this very article will be linked to in the near future. At any rate, despite the poor outlook, these figures reveal just how much technology really became democratized with time. Any form of PC was really expensive back in 1995. Around that era, Bill Gates said that there would be "a PC at every home, and at every desk." That statement sounded a little insane back then, but in retrospect wasn't crazy enough, as today we have what would be sci-fi hardware... in everyone's pocket or purse. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals. - Eximo That puts high end memory capacities somewhere around 1/3 the price of the mid 90s. (1TB of DDR5 is around 40k, vs about $200 for 16GB) But that was a time of quite extreme prices for all aspects of computing, not isolated to a single commodity. By the late 90s, memory prices had plummeted to about 1/5 of what they were and storage drive capacity/price was dropping like crazy every few months as competition drove them to the bottom.Reply Though CPU prices were about the same. Top of the line chips could go for as much as $750, but mid-range current gen CPUs were pushing $400 which is a little high. - Mindstab Thrull I remember paying a lot more attention back then to how much categories of components cost. Some of the changes, comparing "what you need for a functional build" (as opposed to "for a build to do task X"):Reply The OS was $50-100 - 50 each for DOS and Windows (pricing in Canadian dollars) Memory was often $200 just to get going Floppy drive to at least install the OS was often 25-50 (CD-ROM wasn't as common yet) Graphics card was a necessity, unless your motherboard (!) had graphics capabilities, and that was another $100 if I recall correctly. Case for $35 usually included a "good enough" power supply (most people I knew didn't even realize you could buy them separately) A display was often $300 at the lower end Keyboard and mouse could easily set you back $25 for cheap basic ones - the kind you can find at the dollar store these days. You could get something basic around 1300 or so. Nowadays that gets you a quite cromulent machine - even an acceptable laptop.
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