'386 Unix Wars

[Alan Mintz]

In article <1990Dec21.214440.20985 at ico.isc.com>, rcd at ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
> larry at nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:
> > tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
> ...
> > >Anyway, memory is so damn cheap these days...
> ...
> > My beef is that I can only put 12 megs in my machine without causing
> > problems with the multiport boards ...
> 
> Larry's problem is one of a larger class, which says that memory upgrades
> are not necessarily cheap and trivial.  While it's true that you can almost
> go to the corner grocery and buy SIMMs at $50/Mb, come home, plug 'em in to
> a modern motherboard, fire up and go, there are cases where "just add more
> memory" doesn't work now, and more cases where it won't work in the future:

> 	- Memory for older machines/motherboards can be very expensive.
> 	  The wonder of memory < $50/Mb becomes less wondrous if you have
> 	  to spend $1000 on a new motherboard to get it.

Or people like Northgate, who produced machines that actually required a
PAL change to change from 256K to 1Mb chips (even on some machines that use
SIMMs). They actually have the balls to charge $100 for two PAL chips.
(Of course, the salesman mentions, they are included if you buy your
memory from them - at $150/Mb)
-- 
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