I found an old Computer Shopper from the late 1990s and had forgotten how ridiculously expensive computer equipment was - the real sub-$1000 market wasn't even a thing for PCs until 1997, and the range between a sub-$1000 computer and an expensive one was astounding even for day-to-day tasks.
I won an AT&T Safari NSX/20 laptop [1] in 1992 in the ACM Programming Competition. RRP was $5749 then, for a 386SX processor running at 20MHz, 4MB RAM and a monochrome screen. $10,200 in today's money. It was actually a beautifully made machine.
A year later, I switched to a Dell with 386DX and a 387 math coprocessor because my PhD needed the number crunching. That cost twice as much (i.e. around $20k in today's money), paid by the military lab sponsoring my research.
In our current times of cheap compute, it is easy to forget how much top-end computers cost 25-30 years ago.
>the real sub-$1000 market wasn't even a thing for PCs until 1997
YES! I was at intel when they were doing the initial research to even see if a <$1,000 machine was feasible. With the celeron... and this is when they were literally paying millions to companies to optimize to the intel processors so they had software that would be subjectively digestible by the market to purchase software and machines thinking that they were getting compute power for their buck.
