On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:56 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk < [email protected]> 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
