TOTAL RECALL

When - if ever - will memory prices go back down?

- Phil Iwaniuk

For a few minutes in 2002, I thought I'd discovered the ultimate PC hardware upgrade secret. Huddled around a thrumming beige CRT monitor, my friend Luke and I stared wide-eyed at a website he'd found the night before. A website which, to our relatively untrained teenage eyes, seemed to be offering us the chance to just... download a new graphics card.

Our troubles were over. There would be no need to go from house to house in our neighbourhood mowing lawns as we'd previously planned. Instead we could just hit the download button and, via an installation process whose mechanics weren't clear to us and which we knew in our heart of hearts was impossible, a Voodoo 3 card would simply materialise somehow at software level in our system.

It was silly. Of course it was. These were circuit boards, made of actual, tangible materials like silicon, and they came in big, exciting cardboard boxes with closeup pictures of people's faces with neon paint on them. No matter what this unsecured FTP site said, there was simply no way of turning a Voodoo 2 into a Voodoo 3 by simply downloading some files. And yet 23 years later as memory prices spiral into absurd numbers, I'm probably not the only one who's considered googling 'download more RAM'.

RAM RAID