Historical Price of Computer Memory

The cost of computer memory (RAM) has undergone one of the most staggering declines in industrial history, dropping by more than eight orders of magnitude over the last fifty years. In 1970, with the introduction of the first commercial DRAM chips like the Intel 1103, a single megabyte of memory cost approximately 734,000 USD. During this era, memory was the most significant hardware expense for institutions operating mainframes and minicomputers. As manufacturing scaled and the personal computer revolution took hold in the 1980s, prices plummeted to under 1,000 USD per megabyte by 1985.

The 1990s and 2000s saw a continuation of this trend, driven by intense competition and advancements in semiconductor lithography. By the turn of the millennium, the price of a megabyte had reached roughly 1.00 USD, enabling the widespread adoption of multi-tasking operating systems and high-resolution graphics. While the overall trend has been a consistent decline, the market has experienced occasional price spikes caused by factory disasters, supply shortages, or shifts in technology. Notably during the 2017-2018 memory crunch and the recent surge in demand for high-bandwidth memory driven by artificial intelligence. Today, RAM is essentially a commodity, with prices averaging around 0.003 USD per megabyte, or roughly 3.00 USD per gigabyte.

Sources: ourworldindata.org, jcmit.net, HumanProgress.org, Tom's Hardware, PCPartPicker.