A2Aviator wrote:
The reason everyone was cloning or doing their own thing otherwise back when was because there was a crap ton of surplus DRAMs .. Pulls, clipped leads, etc. Prime stuff thats dirt cheap and with the price that RAM cards were selling for, it was easy pickin's.
Not to mention that even the spot price of prime DRAMs was always in rapid fluctuation, with a fast downward trend. After the IBM PC was introduced, supply accelerated and prices dropped even faster-- and the Apple II could use almost any generic DRAM. It was not unusual throughout the 1980s for DRAM prices to drop by a factor of three or four while retail prices for RAM cards stayed constant--a perfect inducement for cloning. And those who didn't buy clones bought minimally populated cards and added DRAM they bought themselves. In December, 1980, I bought my first Apple ][+ with 16K and within a week added another 32K purchased mailorder for $60! -michael NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."