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Comment by Findecanor | Hacker News Reader

For 1985, I'd think that you'd also have to imagine that DRAM was cheaper than what it really was.

RISC and especially MMU with paging increase memory requirements. For comparison, the first Amiga was designed for 128K, got 256K. Linux/M68K with MMU on the Amiga required 4MB to be usable.

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Yes. When I was playing around with different configuration for what a machine could look like back then, you realize that the RAM cost is dominate. So you can develop as many chips as you want, that leads to high fixed cost, but the marginal cost is tiny.

While on the other hand, RAM is easely equal to all other chips on the board combined.

So you need to desperatly do everything you can to limit RAM usage. That's why Amiga was smart to do shared RAM between the CPU and the Chipset. The Archimedes did the same thing as well. And ideally you get some SRAM on there not depend on the RAM to much, ARM3 chip did that and speed improved by a huge extent.

And you really need a good operating system that could give you advanced features without completely blowing up your RAM.

That is why it is sad that nobody with sufficent capital to pump into costume chip design took on a project like that, as it needs to be somebody with the volume the economics work out.

But nobody did and instead we got there threw an iterative process where PC manufactures pumped out PC and bought the cheapest chips, while Intel and chip companies integrated the board more and more. I remember learning about Southbridge and Northbridge, and that essentially the design you end up with.

You dont need to ship gobs of ram as long as you standardize expansion. Commodore was very bad at reading the room and shipped artificially limited hardware https://a4000bear.neocities.org/overclock/Agnus/Agnus Afaik absolute max was either 2MB chip ram or 1MB chip + 1.8 MB slow with Gary adaptor.

The least they should have done was actually shipping Fast Ram controller (with unpopulated ram) in every single Amiga model since 1987 A500. Instead we got trapdoor expanding shared slow/chipset ram with very limited addressability.

Atari for what is worth quickly standardized on using SIMM sockets right on the motherboard and supported 4MB.

Oh yeah totally agree. I was just thinking at the primary sales package, most people likely would open the box and put in new rams. Developing a standard socket makes a huge aomunt of sense. Back then every company had their own standard (or many).

I think Amiga was fine at reading the room, at least the engineers. But the never did any signifciant chip develpement to improve things. Only the new chipset for the Amiga 1200 when it was already much to late.

This reminds me of how expensive RAM was back then. I remember spending $180 to add 512KB to my Amiga 500 in 1988 or so. $180 was a lot of money back then.

Ram was relatively cheap between 1985 and 1987 hovering around $100-150 using 256Kbit chips. Then 1987 anti dumping laws lined up with fabs upgrading to lower yielding new 1Mbit chips and things got crazy. In 1988 256K chips went from $3.5 to $7 in less than a month. Some companies coped better than others - Atari was the first to offer computer shipping with 1MB below $1000. Tramiels little secret was smuggling ram from Japan and skirting anti dumping restrictions :)

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-r... https://web.archive.org/web/20180817061246/https://www.atari... TLDR up to $6Mil a month of smuggled ram from Japan by Atari to make money on a side :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20171220171525/https://www.atari...

"Source [an informant to the FBI who is apparently an Atari employee] remembers the first DRAM shipment arriving in 1988 was sold to Sun Micro Systems in Milpitas, CA. Source was told to deliver this shipment by [redacted]. [redacted] told Source to leave all [redacted] including his [redacted] and to take [redacted] which had an Atari logo on them. When Source delivered the Integrated Circuits, [redacted] cashier's check from Sun Microsystems to deliver to Atari, and the payee's name was left blank."

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