hey im thinkin of scrappin my old old old comp for RAM and i need to know, what kind of ram (the name) went into those old 486's anyway. i know new ones are DDR and SD and stuff but what went into those? thanks.

A 486 would have either EDO or FPM ram. Both type are obsolete and not used in new systems. However it is still sold and is not very cheap. You might be able to make a few bucks on ebay.

486 machines generally use(d) 30 pin and/or 72 pin SIMMs. The 72 pin chips were either FPM (fast page memory) or EDO (extended data out). Beware, though, that you probably shouldn't use both 30 and 72-pin chips at the same time, if your motherboard consists of both slots. I believe the 30 pin chips run at 70ns and the 72 pin ones run at 60 ns (at least the EDO ones do). I attempted this and ended up with corrupt data. If I were you, I'd use EDO, if possible, such as this or this. Keep in mind that the L2 cache on the motherboard will probably not cache more than 32 Meg of RAM (my 486 is limited in this way), and therefore any more memory than that will slow the machine down. Many Pentiums are limited to 64 Meg of RAM in this way. It looks as if Computer Geeks (second link) has new 16 Meg EDO SIMMs for $6. Get 2 of those to get the 32 Meg of memory, and you're set. Try to make sure you have 72 pin slots first, though (and hopefully they support EDO, as well). Good luck.

Just to warn you, some 486 boards will not support EDO ram, I had this problem with my old 486, I had to use 70ns FPM, which was ok because it meant I could use the 30pin slots as well, in the end I had a whoping 24MB of RAM.