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Comment by helpfulContrib | Hacker News Reader

In the US, in the 90's, there were many, many other cottage-shop PC builders, setting up shop.

So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it, like .. on the regular, much cheaper.

Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in those days.

(Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)

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My general feeling is that folks tend to have somewhat unreliable memories about how early certain things got cheap. Catalogs are not perfect, but they don't change over time. That said, I managed to find a Computer Shopper from August 1992 on the Internet Archive [0]. There definitely are some systems in there advertised at the $1K price point with HD and monitor (though generally no sound card), but also a lot of sellers with nothing that cheap for a complete system.

Not sure what the proper conclusion is about how competitive the pricing of the 600 was from that, but I think the catalog does reinforce how much further in the hole they were a bit higher up the price chart. If you wanted to spend a bit more, the only 1st party offering from Commodore until the fall of 1992 was the Amiga 3000. Not sure what they were charging for one of those at the time, but apart from the builtin SCSI I don't think it compares very favorably with a 386DX with SVGA and those weren't all that expensive by then. The 4000 did launch a little after this catalog, but it was priced much higher than the 486 systems that were already on the market.

[0] https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-august-1992/

The 90s was days spent looking at advertisements in the free local weekly that were just lists of parts and prices; you could build your own or have one assembled for big discounts compared to pre-made machines.

And for home users and even smaller businesses - that’s just what you did.

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