Thanks. So was there a "jump" in memory capacity after the technology reached a certain state? What was it and when did it occur approximately?

No jump - just a steady reduction in cost, exponential in shape. "Moore's Law" is the explanation why.

Good visualization at hblok.net/storage

Why "between" the 60s and 80s". Memory was even more expensive before 1960.

@another-dave Yes I know, but as I said I'm not sure about the decade/year range so I've let others fix it for me. I suppose "before the 90's" could be fair enough, but I'm open to other suggestions. Also, I should have mentioned in the question but I'm limiting it to personal computers or at least a bit earlier ones (e.g. small wardrobe-sized -- placing it in the 60's initially was a hunch). But the question may as well be changed to include the whole period since the advent of computers up to the time before memory could be considered "cheap and plentiful".

Not sure why memory stands out. Everything was more expensive and scarce back in the day. Burgeoning, developing industry that was even still seeking a mass market in which to scale in to in the first place.

Why is a 300 HP Porsche so much more expensive than a 34 HP VW of the same time? Both are basically the same car, aren't they?

It always has been the same. in 1982 64 KiB was still expensive but already too little. 2002 64 MiB was still expensive but already too little. And today, 2022, 64 GiB shows the same issue. So neither new, nor remarkable, nor any singular reasoning.

@WillHartung I'm reading the part of But How Do It Know? which explains how computer memory works, so I wanted to get that out of the way specifically. :) Anyway I think it turned out to be a fine question for the site. And by the way, much respect for the people here.

I'm not sure about it being always the same. In 2012 8GiB was pretty expensive, but somehow in 2022 8GiB is still enough for many things including AAA games and costs next to nothing compared to other components.

@Raffzahn: Because as computers get more powerful, we expect more of them. 1980's gamers were satisfied moving 8×8 sprites around the screen. Now we want our characters rendered in 3-D with realistic facial expressions in 4K resolution.

In 1800, plain nails, like you would use to attach wood with a hammer, were incredibly expensive because they had to be forged by hand one at a time by a blacksmith. Then we invented machines to make them cheaper and faster - supply went up, price went down. Then our machines got better - supply went up more, costs came down more. Now nails are cheap and we use them everywhere. The same thing happened with semiconductors. We made one, then ten at a time, then a hundred at a time...a thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and now billions at a time.

"Between the 60s and 80s" is too broad a span but go back to somewhere in the middle. Multiply a few specs such as processor speed, bus capacity and graphics resolution and it's easy to see an increase in broad capability of at least hundreds of thousands of times; perhaps millions. Compare that to performance improvements in the car or TV industries, even over a generation longer. Compound that with the legend that back then, there was only one - count 'em; one - factory producing the world's entire supply of the black plastic substrate so vital for all chips!

@dirkt The original core memory (starting with Whirlwind?) was hand-threaded, but it wasn't a clear winner (over, umm, Drum?) until the threading was simplified to make it machine-threadable.

@ojs The same argument could be made historically for almost any arbitrary amount of RAM. The reality is that most things that the average consumer does on their home computer need almost no RAM at all, and this has almost always been the case. Professional and scientific usage has always been what’s pushing the limits, and RAM is still expensive there by most measures.

@AustinHemmelgarn to reiterate, before 2010 or so, the "almost no RAM at all" that was needed to get basic desktop stuff done was growing exponentially over time. Now we've been stuck at 8 GiB for a decade and it looks like M1 and new generation consoles are setting the next standard to 16 GiB. Could you list some other numbers that have similar history?