A lot can happen in 40 years. Just ask early investors Micron technology (name: mu).

Micro went public in 1984 (42 years ago) as a small memory technology company based in Boise, Idaho. Back then, if you wanted to invest $1,000 in Micron stock, you would have called your broker directly on the phone and placed an order. There was no click; there was no real-time confirmation.

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If you had placed this order over the phone and let your stock grow over that period of time, this is what would have happened.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Micron’s stock rose fivefold, driven by the expansion of personal computers and the success of its early DRAM chips. Your original $1,000 would have turned into about $5,700.

The late 1990s offered another surge in value. Demand for memory technology exploded alongside the Internet boom, and Micro became one of the largest memory producers in the world. At the height of the dot-com era in March 2000, your original $1,000 investment would have been worth more than $50,000.

Then, of course, came the shock.

The dot-com bust absolutely crushed Micron stock. And while the company continued to innovate throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the stock didn’t regain its dot-com-era highs for about two decades.

All told, if you had stayed invested since 1984 during the dot-com crash and the tough years leading up to the current AI boom, your original $1,000 investment would be worth about $414,500 today (January 27, 2026).

Put another way: every $1 invested in Micron in 1984 has turned into roughly $414 today.

Micron continues to rise in 2026, but its valuation doesn’t seem stretched. It currently trades at around 12 times forward earnings, which is lower than the tech sector average (around 25). Considering the importance of memory in today’s technology, there is a good chance that this action has a lot of advantages.

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