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From: scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Scott Mitchell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Are memory prices going up???
Date: 02 Sep 1996 10:59:27 GMT
Organization: Queen Mary & Westfield College, London, UK
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <SCOTT.96Sep2115927@crux.dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
References: <32255CD3.41C67EA6@bnr.ca> <505523$g1@anorak.coverform.lan>
NNTP-Posting-Host: crux.dcs.qmw.ac.uk
In-reply-to: brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk's message of 29 Aug 1996 23:19:47 +0100
In article <505523$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 :)
Scott
--
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell, CompSci Dept, Queen Mary & Westfield College, London, UK
mailto:scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~scott
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