Prior to the mid 1990s, RAM was the most expensive component of a personal computer, to the point that the RAM could easily cost more than the whole rest of the computer put together. Businesses that provided computers in their offices would routinely solder the RAM chips to the motherboards in order to prevent tech-savvy employees from pilfering the RAM and walking out the door with thousands of dollars worth of easily concealable computer chips in their pockets. There was literally a thriving black market for stolen RAM.

I bring this up both as a fun bit of historical trivia, and as a critical piece of cultural context for understanding first-wave literary cyberpunk. From a modern perspective, the genre’s preoccupation with ultra-valuable black market computer chips as a plot device might look like more evidence that the people writing this stuff had never actually used a computer in their lives (which was often true) – but no: at the time, that’s genuinely how it worked!