Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
One gigabyte of RAM cost as much as a house back in 1995 — $64,000 price tag resurfaced in 31-year-old press release, equivalent to $140,000 today
Looking back in time is always interesting, especially when visiting any topic that's technology-adjacent — and doubly so when looking at the evolution of pricing. The price of memory continues to be a hot-button topic, and an eagle-eyed Redditor came across a 1995 press release from Advantage Memory Corporation announcing prices for its freshly released DIMMs, revealing that fitting a high-end machine with 1 GB of RAM would set you back as much as a cheap house.
The figures on display are rather shocking when converted to today's dollars, with 8 MB of RAM going for $399, or $874 in today's money, and a 64 MB stick ringing in at $3,900, or $8,540 in 2026. The Apple Power Macintosh mentioned in the PR had 12 slots, so it could fit in as much as 1.5 GB of RAM, and although the pricing for 128 MB DIMMs wasn't mentioned, those would be around $8,000 a pop, so "only" 1 GB of RAM would come in at $64,000 — enough for a house back then in the more affordable areas of the U.S. By the way, that amount would be $140,000 today.
In 1995, memory technology was transitioning from SIMMs to the spankin' new DIMMs, and Command and Conquer, MechWarrior 2, and the original Need for Speed were coming out. 16 MB of RAM was generally accepted as a decent amount of memory for a build, roughly matching the 16 GB of today. Some quick math says those 16 MB of the new technology were about $800, or in today's money, the princely sum of $1,751.
As of today, 16 GB of DDR5 will set you back $200 to $250, but the price of memory has been extremely volatile, to say the least. Plus, not only is supplyrumored to drop, server RAM contract prices are expected to rise, and the few crumbs left for the consumer market are still rising in price.
SK hynix chairman Chey Tae-won even suggested that DRAM wafer shortages could last until 2030 at least. The fact that all the major RAM makers are shifting their production lines to HBM for AI accelerators is only making the problem worse. Yes, $200 is still a long way from $1,750, but with things keeping in this direction, there's a non-zero chance this very article will be linked to in the near future.
At any rate, despite the poor outlook, these figures reveal just how much technology really became democratized with time. Any form of PC was really expensive back in 1995. Around that era, Bill Gates said that there would be "a PC at every home, and at every desk." That statement sounded a little insane back then, but in retrospect wasn't crazy enough, as today we have what would be sci-fi hardware... in everyone's pocket or purse.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
That puts high end memory capacities somewhere around 1/3 the price of the mid 90s. (1TB of DDR5 is around 40k, vs about $200 for 16GB) But that was a time of quite extreme prices for all aspects of computing, not isolated to a single commodity. By the late 90s, memory prices had plummeted to about 1/5 of what they were and storage drive capacity/price was dropping like crazy every few months as competition drove them to the bottom.
Though CPU prices were about the same. Top of the line chips could go for as much as $750, but mid-range current gen CPUs were pushing $400 which is a little high.
I remember paying a lot more attention back then to how much categories of components cost. Some of the changes, comparing "what you need for a functional build" (as opposed to "for a build to do task X"):
The OS was $50-100 - 50 each for DOS and Windows (pricing in Canadian dollars)
Memory was often $200 just to get going
Floppy drive to at least install the OS was often 25-50 (CD-ROM wasn't as common yet)
Graphics card was a necessity, unless your motherboard (!) had graphics capabilities, and that was another $100 if I recall correctly.
Case for $35 usually included a "good enough" power supply (most people I knew didn't even realize you could buy them separately)
A display was often $300 at the lower end
Keyboard and mouse could easily set you back $25 for cheap basic ones - the kind you can find at the dollar store these days.
You could get something basic around 1300 or so. Nowadays that gets you a quite cromulent machine - even an acceptable laptop.
Well the average among of RAM was 4-8MB back then so that’s 125-250x the average amount. 125-250x the average of 8GB would be 2-4TB now which is 50-100K.
That puts high end memory capacities somewhere around 1/3 the price of the mid 90s. (1TB of DDR5 is around 40k, vs about $200 for 16GB) But that was a time of quite extreme prices for all aspects of computing, not isolated to a single commodity. By the late 90s, memory prices had plummeted to about 1/5 of what they were and storage drive capacity/price was dropping like crazy every few months as competition drove them to the bottom.
Though CPU prices were about the same. Top of the line chips could go for as much as $750, but mid-range current gen CPUs were pushing $400 which is a little high.
CPUs weren’t much better 10 years ago. Skylake X was $600-2000
CPUs weren’t much better 10 years ago. Skylake X was $600-2000
Different class of CPU though. HEDT didn't really exist back in the day. I suppose the Pentium Pro might count, but it was quickly supplanted by the Pentium II and III.
I believe I looked up the top Pentium and that cost $750 at release, though I don't think the price stayed that high. Comparable to the i9 and top Ryzen 9 AMD chips. If we start counting Threadripper, Xeon, and Epyc...
Well the average among of RAM was 4-8MB back then so that’s 125-250x the average amount. 125-250x the average of 8GB would be 2-4TB now which is 50-100K.
I used 16MB, which is what I eventually had. Can't actually remember the exact years I went from 4 to 8 and 8 to 16. I do distinctly remember it getting cheaper each time I bought more.
Not long after that I bought my first DIMM, the sales person hadn't yet gotten longer antistatic sleeves, and was using tape to hold the memory in. I insisted on getting a fresh stick that was not taped in.
