I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete.

We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel.

3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or whatever, the CPU and RAM wouldn't cut it. Besides, a decent new PC would "only" cost you around half of what you paid back in 1994/1995.

When I purchased a gaming PC in early 2008, that PC could still handle modern games 10 years later! And that was a mid-level gaming PC I paid around $1k for.