undefined | Better HN

0 pointsantisthenes3mo ago0 comments

> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM

We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today.

Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it.

Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser.

What does your math say about that?

0 comments

kragen3mo ago

Math says that's stupid. You can still do everything with a "meg" of RAM that you could do in 01987. In fact, the "meg" of RAM you get now is enormously faster, and you can interface it to other things that you couldn't get at the time, such as SSDs, so you can do strictly more with it.

Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.

adrianN3mo ago

You can still run software from 1987 on a megabyte of ram, it just does different things from a modern browser.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse