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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Yup, I remember my parents being very frugal but then realized they bought an Intellivision for us kids that cost $400 in the mid-80s, when the median household income was ~$20k.

With household incomes being almost $70k today, that's like spending $1400 on a video game system today.

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This era had something called "layaway" -- put a percentage down and then you could make random incremental payments and take it home when it was fully paid for.

This was used much more frequently than children of the era might remember.

Which people often do with PC builds. Not much different in terms of cost.

Depends.

If my memory serves me well, I did a $320 build somewhere in ~2010 for a friend. For the giggles I launched F.E.A.R. on it. It worked.

What's the price of a decent gaming PC these days? About the same?

I still remember what I paid for a PC in 1997.... $3500 for a dell with 128MB of ram, 400 MHz Pentium II, 10MB HD, zip drive, 21 inch monitor... My wife's company paid for half of it.. otherwise would have bough a cheaper one... 2 years later you could buy all that for less than half with a 1GHZ P III

Define 'decent'.

Since ~ 1995 a decent PC (runs everything, not a mind blowing rig) were always around $2000 with monitor, with a sharp decline to $1000 around late '00 and a slight increase since then but there is nothing a $200 GPU with a decent CPU and enough amount of RAM can't what a rig $4000+ can't do, only slower.

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