[Tuna-Fish]

> I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.

That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces. Micron started a price war with Japanese memory manufacturers, the Japanese cut prices to compete, Micron sued them for "dumping". The saga ended with the 1986 U.S.–Japan Semiconductor Agreement, which, among other things, created production controls that limited the total dram supply. The level was set based on then current demand, and due to the rapid growth of demand at the time it almost instantly caused a massive global supply deficit.

The agreement also caused the rise of the South Korean memory industry, because the Japanese companies offloaded their now surplus equipment for cheap.

[FarmerPotato]

I worked in DRAM salvage from 1987-88. It became niche profitable to harvest 4116s from years-old boards (4164s if you could get them) and put them right back into 256K memory expansion boards for PC ATs.

256K bytes of RAM that way made us $128 in sales. I earned $3.35 an hour. Any inventory I accumulated went out the door next morning.

It was a brief moment, but it makes me wonder if we'll see refurbished memory in fashion next year.

BTW the company, OEM Parts, was one of the last great surplus shops, surviving until just recently. Probably there were still cardboard bins with my handwriting for all the TTL chips that weren't in demand.

[vitally3643]

No joke, at my startup we had to inventory all our unused prototype hardware to see how much memory we could reclaim. Last month.

We are not launching our product this year. We can scrape together enough memory for shareholder and show floor demo units, but we have tens of thousands of people on the waiting list and we simply can't get that much memory at any price. What we can get would mean a $400 price bump.

What the hell do you even do?

[SiempreViernes]

> That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces.

Funny how you then go on to explain it was market _actors_ that drove the politicians to act, but that this is nevertheless totally not an example of market _forces_.

[actionfromafar]

Market forces are usually meant in the spherical cow sense, not that the cow has politicians on their pockets.

Here it's useful to point out that free markets can't exist without an external force keeping them in check.