Google says sdram in 1997 was 7 to 10 dollars per megabyte. So 384 would be 3840 not 40,000 am I missing something here?
I had a desktop PC that I bought (as a pile of bits!) with 512MB of RAM in 1999 and I sure as hell didn't pay more than a couple of hundred for memory. That might have been EDO rather than SDRAM though but I can't see the price difference being that much!
Possibly inflation adjusted?