alt Hacker NewsIf we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.
So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.
That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.
Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.
> 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?