C O M P U T E R

P O W E R

U S E R

Computer RAM Specs

AM has come a long way over the years.
Heres a list of personal computers and
the amounts of RAM that came standard in
the year listed. Outside of the earliest PCs,
most of the computers here would be considered midrange systems and are intended
to be a representative of the average types
of computers available during that year.

1975

1977

1979

MITS releases the

Altair 8800 with
256 bytes of RAM.
Apple II, Commodore PET,
and Tandy TRS-80 are all
released with 4KB of RAM.
The Commodore PET computer is upgraded to offer 8KB,
16KB, or 32KB of RAM.

1983

1984

1986

1988

1990

IBM releases the XT with

128KB of RAM.
Apple releases its first
Macintosh PC with 128KB of
RAM. Later in the year, Apple
upgrades it to 512KB of RAM.

1994

Gateway releases
the Family PC with
8MB of RAM.

1996

Acer releases the P200

with 32MB of RAM.

IBM releases PC XT 286

with 640KB of RAM.

1998

Commodore releases
Amiga 500 with 512KB,
expandable to 9MB.

2000

Apple releases
Macintosh SE 30 with
1MB or 4MB of RAM.
2001
Compaq releases the Presario
425 with 4MB of RAM.

RAM decreases the amount of RAM you

have available for other applications.
Once the OS has loaded, youre ready to
begin working. When you load an application,
such as Microsoft Word, the microprocessor
loads the components needed to run the application into the RAM cells. As you create a document, it is also stored in RAM. While you
work on different aspects of the application,
data continually moves from RAM to the
microprocessor and back. Millions or billions
of bits of data can move between RAM and
the microprocessor per second.
Each time you save your work, RAM passes
a copy of the document to the hard drive for
more permanent storage. A copy remains in
RAM as long as the document is open. Data

Memory manufacturers flood

the market, causing prices to
drop significantly to around
$5 to $10 for 1MB of RAM.

The Windows 95 operating system requires 8MB to

16MB of RAM. DRAM sales top $25 billion. Users
paid $25 to $50 for 1MB of RAM. EDO (extended
data output) DRAM is introduced.

The Windows 98
operating system
requires 32MB to
64MB of RAM.

RDRAM (Rambus DRAM)

for the PC is introduced.
SDRAM (synchronous
DRAM) is introduced.

IBM releases the PC 300PL

with 128MB of SDRAM,
expandable to 1GB.

Hewlett-Packard releases
the Pavilion 9800 with
256MB of DDR SDRAM,
expandable to 2GB.

continually moves from the hard drive to

RAM and back, too. Once you close the document and the application, the computer
removes those components from RAM.
Occasionally, some stray data may remain in
RAM; this could eventually cause some out of
memory errors in your computer if you dont
reboot before the error occurs. Some malfunctioning software packages might not remove
themselves from RAM, causing system crashes.
Speed It Up
As you can see, being able to access the
RAM cells extremely quickly is vital to the
overall speed with which your computer can
work. To improve the computers overall
speed, engineers want to minimize the amount

Users pay about $2 for 1MB of RAM.

DDR (double-data-rate) SDRAM
is introduced.

2001

1996

More than $10

billion worth of
DRAM is sold.

1995

1993

quickly increasing numbers.) Most computers

using non-parity memory chips, or chips that
dont contain error-checking features, perform
this memory check when the computer boots
and never check the memory again after that.
A dozen or more years ago, error checking was
an important feature for RAM chips because of
common errors in the data storage. Because
todays RAM chips are extremely reliable, error
checking is a rare feature in newer RAM chips.
After running component checks, the
computer begins loading data into the RAM
cells, including information about the OS.
Any of the OS components the CPU will
probably access frequently usually end up in
RAM for the duration of the computing
session. The loading of OS components into

1992

1999

The Commodore 64 is
released with 64KB of RAM.

199 7 1998

1981

Dell releases the

Dimension L500c with
64MB of SDRAM,
expandable to 512MB.

Users pay about 25 cents for 1MB of RAM,

as another price crash occurs. The introduction of the Windows XP operating system
will require at least 128MB of RAM.