Out of Memory Error – The RAM Shortage of 1988 (2016)

There's an interesting tale related to this that occurred in 1993. On July 4th 1993 a plant that made epoxy resin for semiconductor packaging in Japan exploded and was destroyed by fire. As a consequence there was a significant spike in DRAM prices that summer. I happen to remember this specifically as that summer as I was on a one month work term at a software house where I got to work on the POSIX environment running under VMS on a DEC Alpha. My task was to get their test suites runing on the Alpha (mostly a bunch of shell scripts). When I went to purchase a couple of SIMMs to upgrade the memory of my Amiga, the prices had more than doubled relative to the month before. A year or two after that low profile DRAM packages started to show up in SIMMs that had no more than a millimeter of height to reduce the amount of epoxy used in each chip.

Relevant: Price of RAM over history[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jcmit.net&#x2F;memoryprice.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jcmit.net&#x2F;memoryprice.htm</a>

Could be a myth or not, but it was said back in 1993 that a fire in a cresol chemical factory in Japan made DRAM prices to go up, which delayed the adoption of Windows NT.<p>Semi related: Using some Unix flavor in PCs was a desire for many, but always postponed because it took twice the RAM as Windows. First heard about Linux in 1996 but started to play with it in 1998 when I could afford a separate PC with 64MB of RAM to run it comfortably.

1986 US-Japan semiconductor trade agreement is of singular importance and merits study. I recommend Trade Politics and the Semiconductor Industry (1994), an NBER working paper.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w4745" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w4745</a>

This really brings back memories (no pun intended) of getting a computer shopper and thumbing through the THOUSANDS of computer part vendors in the 80&#x27;s and 90&#x27;s and their ads<p>It was a really sublime time to be alive in the PC industry. Expansion cards, CPUs, SIMMS, video cards, etc.

I remember the NES game Zelda II, The Adventure of Link, was delayed. Nintendo Power or some other NES magazine had a quote from Link saying he was sorry but there was an issue with some chips.<p>I forgot all about that delay until seeing this headline, and Zelda II is mentioned specifically in the article.

In 1988 I was working at Mentor Graphics, in Beaverton, Oregon.<p>One day somebody mentioned that, at some unknown time in the previous three months, somebody had raided all the Macs in managers&#x27; offices, removing all but one memory stick in each. Nobody had noticed.<p>Also: I found an invoice I paid in the early &#x27;90s, $1000 for eight one-megabyte RAM SIMMs. Yes, megabytes. They filled out an Apple SE&#x2F;30 I used to run Apple A&#x2F;UX. (A&#x2F;UX was Apple&#x27;s Unix, System V with Berkeley extensions, and a Mac System 7 GUI emulator, <i>which worked</i>.) It compiled Gcc in about 2 hours. It had–well, has, still–an 80MB disk drive.<p>I only just recently found out I could have put in 4MB sticks not long after, and had 32M instead, which would have felt infinite.

This is one of the big reasons OS&#x2F;2 crashed and burned. Version 1.1 released in 88 was the first version with presentation manager. And you really wanted a 4MB system, which just became insanely expensive. Windows&#x2F;286 still ran in under a megabyte and Windows&#x2F;386 could multitask MSDOS, something the FOOTBALL OS&#x2F;2 betas could do, but IBM pulled from the product.

&gt; <i>A two-megabit chip, for example, was $599 in September 1985, making the cost-per-megabyte for larger-capacity RAM $300, per McCallum’s analysis.</i><p>The numbers here make no sense, and it is because they don&#x27;t match the source analysis: It&#x27;s a two <i>megabyte</i> chip, for $599, that appears in the analysis. (Thus, $600 for 2 MB = $300&#x2F;MB.)

There seems to be some confusion on the part of the author on memory capacities.<p>He said a “2mbit chip” then goes on the conflate this term with MB<p>If indeed he is talking about 2mbit DRAM ics then it’s most likely a 2mbit x 1 chip, which would require 8 to make 2MB of 8 bit wide memory.

I remember this - it was a big deal, similar to the GPU shortages.<p>I won a PC RAM expansion card at a VAR event, and it took months for them to scrape up enough memory to populate it.<p>(It ended up running too hot for my tastes, so I took it out.)