[ale] Slightly OT: Thrilled with 4AllMemory.com replacement

[jonhall80 at comcast.net]

I (and I am sure I am not the only one) who have more stories about RAM and various companies that supplied them....but not always the RAM dealer themselves.

As an example of that, I met a man who was replacing some bad RAM in a friend's PC, and I noticed that they turned off Parity checking in the BIOS even when the RAM itself supported it.   I asked him why he did that, and he explained that Parity checking only caused more people to bring their systems in to have RAM replaced.  Right.

In the early 1980s I was a Unix systems administrator working at Bell Labs and I had six machines that each had one Megabyte of RAM in them (yes, you read that right) and I was asked what I would do to speed them up.   I said "Add more RAM" (up to a maximum of 4 MBytes).   Now DEC sold that RAM for 16 thousand dollars a MegaByte, so buying enough RAM to fill out the system was a lot of money.  My management balked.

I looked into it and found out that other third party vendors were selling "DEC compatible RAM" for four thousand dollars a Megabyte, one fourth of what DEC sold it for.   I recommended that we buy from one of them.

"WHAT?" my management said "How do we know that it will work?"

I told them that if it did not work, these major companies (National Semiconductor was one of them) would not have any customer base.   And they had a money-back guarantee.

So we started an RFP, and two vendors answered.  So I started haggling....er...ah..bartering...er..ah.negotiating.  First with one vendor, then the other.   Eventually I got the vendor down to two thousand a Megabyte...and the chips were socketed into the board, not soldered, so you could replace the chips if necessary.

The second vendor came in for a final quote and when I told him the price there were tears coming out of his eyes and he said "NO, NO, he HAS to be selling them at a LOSS.   He can NOT be making money at that price."

I just told the second vendor that "chips were chips" and we went with the lowest price.

A year later I noticed that one of our machines was having a soft error on memory (it was ECC correctable) but all that came out was a number that supposedly represented the bit error.

I called the vendor and he said "Yes, that is what it is, but we do not know how to relate that number to a chip in Unix."

I told him that he should tell me the algorithm and I would write a program to tell what chip to replace.

He said if I did that he would give me a lifetime of replacement chips.

It took me a day to write the program.  When the operator saw the error message she would type in the number and the program would tell her what board, what row and what column the chip was in and she could replace it.

Later that week I had a tube of replacement chips.

Two years later we bought more machines and we needed more RAM.

I called my supplier and said I wanted more RAM and I wanted it at the same price of 2K per Meg.

He said "Why pay so much?".  I bought the next 12 Megs at 1k USD per Meg, no haggling...er..ah..negotiating involved.

md
> On 06/09/2021 4:28 PM Neal Rhodes via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> Chivalry is not dead. 4AllMemory.com just replaced an 8GB RAM stick, no 
> questions asked.
> 
> We bought it for a cheap ACER laptop about 3 years ago.   It worked ok 
> at the time, but that computer had increasingly episodes of locking up 
> with weird little funky skinny rectangles on the screen.   It got to the 
> point of it not getting all the way through a reboot before it locked 
> up.
> 
> On a hunch, I stuffed the original 4GB back in.  (boy am I glad I cut a 
> hole in the bottom of the case to facilitate RAM swaps...)  And it 
> worked fine.
> 
> Friday before the recent holiday, I sent them an email describing just 
> that, and asking what my options were.
> 
> I didn't hear back from them for about a week, so I called.  They said, 
> "oh, we already shipped you a free replacement, and a return postage 
> label to send that RAM back".
> 
> Sure enough, it arrived yesterday.
> 
> I guess us grey-beards remember back when suppliers treated us like 
> honest adults.   And vacuum tubes hurt when you touched them too.
> 
> regards,
> 
> 
> Neal
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