Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller.
Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."
turns out things are not that bad! we just rolled back to 2010.
oh, wait, now every app is a browser instance. shit.
EDIT: so, how did I arrive at 2010, you ask? I looked at DDR5 pricing and found the closest pricing per GB in the past. this turned out to be DDR3 memory. I think it's totally fair since it was the latest and greatest thing back then, much like DDR5 is now. although, if we compare DDR3 to DDR3, we still roll back pretty far - a very close to current price was spotted in 2018, '17, 15, '13, and '11.
Pretty interesting way to view the context of the current price squeeze, but I feel like it tells a misleading story. As already mentioned in this thread, going back over too far may make this data look misleading since this isn’t inflation adjusted and GB of memory 40 years ago was absurd.
Really the biggest thing that makes the current pricing squeeze unique is that the prices have been on a mostly downward trend in the past and it rose sharply… and quickly.
Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."
oh, wait, now every app is a browser instance. shit.
EDIT: so, how did I arrive at 2010, you ask? I looked at DDR5 pricing and found the closest pricing per GB in the past. this turned out to be DDR3 memory. I think it's totally fair since it was the latest and greatest thing back then, much like DDR5 is now. although, if we compare DDR3 to DDR3, we still roll back pretty far - a very close to current price was spotted in 2018, '17, 15, '13, and '11.
Really the biggest thing that makes the current pricing squeeze unique is that the prices have been on a mostly downward trend in the past and it rose sharply… and quickly.