the bad old days
An old chestnut that I am fond of digging up from the vax 4.3bsd sys/vmparam.h:
* Just for fun: current memory prices are 4600$ a megabyte on VAX (4/22/81), * so we loan each swapped in process memory worth 100$, or just admit * that we don't consider it worthwhile and swap it out to disk which costs * $30/mb or about $0.75.
Memory for a Mac Pro ("expensive" ECC, registered) cost $.04/MB last month.
A cheap WD 1TB disk cost $.00006/MB two weeks later.
Old memory-to-disk cost ratio: 153:1; currently 724:1 for admittedly somewhat expensive memory.
