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."

Look at it this way: while the upfront cost to scale up production is huge, prices are now high enough to justify it even if demand is expected to drop abruptly later on. So if you can wait 5 years for your next PC, 1TB RAM might go for what 64GB would have cost without the AI demand spike.

Granted, if you need a new system before then, you're SOL.

One thing to look out for is supply capacity curiously going offline in 2030 or whatever. That would hint at market power or collusion.

this is interesting. but i’d be more interested to see a graph starting at the point when developers got their own computer.

then the price of ram over time for whatever the daily functional workstation a developer would have needed then.

i mean this is a graph of the price of GIGS of ram from a time period when the space shuttle needed like 1 MB.

One could also blame crypto and AI (they're clearly responsible for some of the volatility in the graph), but I can see the curve flatten in the 2010s, just as Moore's law ended.

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon

My fellow humans, we have retrograded.

You could also do a computing pr dollar graph - which would be a similar sharp decline over the past decades - however it won’t show anything like the memory price spike of the past few years.

So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!

It certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.

is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?

aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.

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.