Remember mid 90's RAM prices? Suddenly, prices dropped. What happened?

[port6667]

I was remembering how expensive simms used to be in the early-mid 90's, and then suddenly prices started dropping. Not slowly, it was like a giant meteorite made out of RAM slammed into the planet and now we have it all over the place just on the ground, so pricing had to drastically go down. What happened exactly? Was it a patent that got invalidated or expired? Was it just a new series of companies getting into the memory game?

[steffann]

There is some nice raw data at http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm. After some searching I found this article on ram technology and their description of what happened to ram prices sounds at least plausible: http://www.oempcworld.com/support/RAM_Technical_Perspective....

[port6667]

All great answers. Thanks for the links here!

[Gibbon1]

I seem to remember that the manufactures oopsed and built too much capacity. No real idea why though. Other neurons firing give rise to the fleeting thought that Japanese and US chip companies got blindsided by the Korean? entry into the market.

I do know that circa 1995 suddenly there was a plethora of CMOS analog chips on the market taking advantage of otherwise idle CMOS lines. Later analog IC companies made good use of obsolete DRAM/CPU production lines.

I wouldn't use any of the above as TRVTH though.

[brudgers]

A factory fire triggered the spike.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/business/the-executive-com...

[mherdeg]

Well, there was a price-fixing cartel that was investigated in 2002 and punished in 2003-5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing .