We had to buy cutting edge pc's spend >£2k on extra ram and £4k on 20 inch crt monitors to develop - the application would run on a 133MZ
If you had less than 2 Blue screens per hour that was a good hour - This was early 90's btw.
Where I worked in the early 1990s (1992-ish), us developers fought over who would have the color terminals (Wyse 370/380) and who would have the monochrome ones (Wyse 50/60). I was low-man on the pole so I always got stuck with the low-spec terminal (though I still have an affinity today to amber VT220 text characters).
Until I "wowed" the owner of the company (small shop) showing how to do windows, dialogs, etc in a terminal using a virtual buffer and some other "tricks". Then I was given one of the color terminals, to jazz our interface (which was mostly numbered menus and basic flat screens).
At one point, I played around with the 16 color Textronix graphics mode you could pop into with the right escape sequence; I think I made a very slow Mandelbrot set generator (never showed that to him; our app was already pushing our dev hardware, which was an IBM RS/6000 desktop workstation running AIX we all shared via 9600 bps serial connections)...
The system was SIROS the system that helped manage the UK's SMDS network so we had budget for it.
The 20 inch monitors where awesome for playing doom late at night