An Open Letter to Random Access Memory

Dear RAM,

I hate you! You suck! If there's a God in Heaven, hardware firms around the globe are working night and day to find a way to make a computer run quickly entirely on flash drive caches or something.

I say this, because I have learned all too late that you, Random Access Memory, are the Devil. Not just a devil. The Devil. Lucifer, if you will, who was cast out of paradise for his sin of pride. I think I need a priest to come to my home and toss holy water around liberally just to cleanse it of your dank and shadowy aura.

I mean, RAM itself is not evil. Don't get me wrong. You provide a necessary service to the computing world: you make space for fast calculations on a volatile medium. And, let's face it, the more of you there is in a machine, the happier its software will be. Software developers, it seems, love to hallucinate – constantly – that you are cheap and abundant and thus there will always be an infinite supply of you everywhere. Developers like this, I pray, will rot in your Hell forever and ever.

RAM, as we now see your problem manifest itself, is not exactly standardized. There is a positive shitload of different kinds of RAM out there, and there are as many different ways for the RAM to function: you can buy RAM with a high latency or a low latency. You can buy RAM with a high "size" or a low "size". You can even buy RAM that will double-check its math and throw out any calculations it thinks it might have erred on making. There are a lot of options to look for in a stick of RAM.

And all of this is well and good, save for the fact that every kind of RAM has every kind of option. You can get high-latency low-size non-error-correcting RAM. You can get high-latency low-size error-correcting RAM. You can get high-latency high-size non-error-correcting RAM. And so on. Ad nauseam.

So it comes as no surprise to anyone anywhere that the RAM I bought this week is the wrong kind. Hey, I admit it. I made a mistake. I'm fully aware that I goofed, and that I deserve to go through the hassle of returning the RAM to the reseller and pay the 15% restocking fee for my ignorance.

But – and I'm pretty sure this is why God damned you, RAM – I still don't know what mistake I made. I cannot with any modicum of reliability say what, precisely, is wrong with the RAM I picked over, say, the RAM the OEM decided works A-OK.

You see RAM, you are a fickle mistress. And you are not verbose about your faults. Did I choose PC-133 compliant RAM instead of PC-100? Should I have picked CL2 instead of CL3? 128MB instead of 256? I consciously made the decision that I wanted better RAM than what I already had. It's a mantra of mine: "Bigger, better, faster, more." But where is the line between "improved" and "incompatible?" I couldn't say: there are no error messages when testing RAM. It doesn't come with an instruction manual (any more). When life was good and SIMMs were only sold in pairs, I was a RAM hot shot, but SDRAM somehow changed everything, and I find myself in the exact same boat as the soccer moms and grandmothers who call their kids over to, in so many words, "fix the damn computer". I hate being in that boat.

I mean, seriously. RAM is not mystical. If the world can standardize on electronic resistors, it can standardize on RAM. I want the insides of computers to begin to approach the idiot-proof concepts you find on the outside of computers.

Could I possibly be talking about color-coded RAM? I could. If you've ever bought a resistor, you'll recognize where I'm going with this: they have colored bands on their bodies that tell you their vital statistics as a kind of code. Resistors aren't meant to be used by just anybody who owns a radio, but the people who assemble and repair radios, either professionally or as a hobby, know the code or can refer to it easily enough.

HP started encoding their ink cartridges: every model gets a single integer value. This way, you don't go looking for something that matches an HP DeskJet 895Cxi. You look for HP cartridge number, say, 14. And you're done. The stock boy at Staples even removes the rest of the guesswork by putting the cartridges in numerical order. If you suddenly find yourself amidst the cartridges in the high 40s, you've gone too far. I think you should work the same way, RAM. People should be able to consult their PC's online documentation and jot down its RAM code: "red, blue, black, three, six" or something to that effect. That makes running down to your local compu-mart a breeze: go to the RAM aisle, and pick up a box or two of RAM. Does it say "red - blue - black - 3 - 6"? You're good to go. No guessing, no mistakes, no need to carefully review a corporate return policy written in blood upon sheepskin parchment under a full harvest moon at midnight.

Mostly, I'm just sick and tired of having to get return merchandise authorization codes from today's top technology retailers. I don't generally think of myself as a total idiot. But when buying memory, I do. And I hate you for it, RAM. You make me want to put down the Philips head screwdriver, back away from the box, and call a professional. And I can never forgive you for that.