21 Jan
2023
21 Jan
'23
10:04 p.m.
On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:56 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Why not gold-plate? Gold was under $200 an ounce fora
while, and the
thickness was thin.
Price is not a very good indicator for gold, especially nowadays as it's so
heavily manipulated/controlled by the banksters.
Looking at this chart showing historical gold production going back to
1960, one can observe that gold supplies decreased sharply during the
1970s, and continued to drop into the 1980s. This seems to coincide with
when memory prices were increasing dramatically (as a result of production
shortages).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_gold#/media/File:Top_5_Gold_Producers.png
At the same time, observe that by the mid- to late-1980s gold production in
the USA, Australia, and China began ramped up sharply. I believe that also
coincides with memory prices coming back down.
Whether that correlation is THE reason or the ONLY reason, I can't say
without further inquiry, but on the face of it, the supply of gold seems to
have been a contributing factor to the price of RAM skyrocketing.
Regardless, whether or not gold is "cheap" is not really the issue in my
opinion. Gold is an expensive material to use relative to most others that
go into making a computer no matter what it costs, and no (sensible)
company is going to use more than it really needs. Thinly-plated gold on
one RAM chip is not that much, but multiply that by a million and now we're
talking a treasure chest.
The first Pentium processor contained about half a gram of gold in it,
which is considerable. There are 31.1g in a troy ounce, and a troy ounce
of gold is currently shooting back towards $2,000 (and likely well beyond
at this point). If you can get your hands on 16 original Pentium
processors, you've got yourself some nice vacation money (ignoring
extraction and refining costs).
Compare that to processors today, which have virtually no gold in the CPU,
and only a thin plating on the pins. And then there's a company several
years ago that created a silver alloy that does not tarnish, obviating the
need for gold plating except for in the most critical electronics
applications.
There's (usually) a good reason companies manufacture their products the
way they do, and it's not to make them look blingy (well, some do). If
it's not absolutely required, they're not going to use it. As soon as it
was feasible to do away with using gold, it was phased out.
Sellam
