The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

We have different memories of computers in the '90s, Gigem.
I got my first personal computer after I got back from Korea (where I used a PC every day) in 1988.  It was an IBM PS1 (?) with a 129 Mb hard drive that I got at Sears for under $300.  There were obviously much more expensive ones available.
I was on either my 2nd or 3rd PC by 1993, when I was assigned to West Point.  The head of our Mapping, Charting, and Geodesy group, whose whole profession revolved around computers, said about getting a new one: "Get the $300 computer.  It won't be the best, but it will do what you need it to do.  When you need a new one, get another $300 computer."
I'm talking desktops here.  I don't like laptops or briefcases.  When I have to use one I will, with a mouse, but I don't enjoy using them at all.  My wife has a Dell laptop that I've had to take to summer teacher workshops.  I hate it.  Not because it's a Dell, but because it's a laptop.
Anyway, my current HP Pavillion (tower CPU) is probably going on 8 or 9 years, and it works fine for what I need it to do.  (Actually, its monitor failed after the warranty expired and I got a replacement from Acer.)  It--the original computer setup--cost more in the range of $400, IIRC.  So, inflation.
All the students where I teach are issued, to keep, Google Chromebooks.  I'm not sure what we're paying for those, but it's got to be in the range of $250-300, I would think.  I wouldn't give $25 for one.  It is a piece of junk, as far as I'm concerned.

Wow, maybe I'm misremembering but it sure seems like computers were very costly in the early 90's.  But I was a broke teenager then, I didn't even buy a real computer until ~1997 and it was a cheap Packard Bell (!) that was about $800-1000 used (scratch and dent new).  

Man that takes me back.  Look at that CRT monitor!!!:86:

Actually I couldn't find an ad from the mid 90's but I distinctly remember PC's costing a lot more than that.  I'm talking about a full feature PC from that era, monitor, CD-ROM drive (!), modem, printer, etc.  

I don't know what it had cost, but I remember our old PC setup with the floppy disks.  There was a game my dad had loaded on it called Leisure Suit Larry that my brother & I used to play until my mom said we couldn't do it any more when she noticed us soliciting a hooker in a bar in the game.   I'm sure I was only around 10 years old at the time but for some reason I remember my mom forbidding the game from us, only there were no parental controls back then so we just did it when she wasn't around since Dad didn't seem to care.  

I bought my first computer circa 1985 from Sam's for $1800.  It had a hard drive, which was a big thing at the time, and two floppy drives, and a green and black monitor.  It was better than the one I used at work, I think it had 256 MEGs of RAM.  Back then, DOS would only handle 640 maxed out, if that.

I used a program called Symphony, which was an enhanced version of Lotus 1-2-3.  It had word processing and communications on it.

That was a lot of money in 1985.  Might have been more like 1988, I think we were in the new house (1987).

The nerd is me feels compelled to mention that your computer probably had 256 Kb, rather than Mb, of RAM. DOS could only do 640kb at a time. There were several reasons for this, chief among them being that no one would EVER need more memory than that!

Later implementations would still have this limitation, but would mitigate it by creating 640kb "pages" of memory - then using a manager to flip between them.

At the time, everyone used to reference the Library of Congress as their standard. A 40Mb hard drive could "store all the books in the Library of Congress" - like someone was going to do that, or understood what that meant. Anyway, 40Mb at the time was considered prohibitively large!

I had begun my "career" a few years earlier when my parents innocently purchased a TRS-80 Color Computer (the kind that plugged into the TV) as an educational project, with help from a family friend in charge of a local bank's nascent computing division, after I'd shown interest in his. Over a couple of birthdays, etc, I acquired a bank of double sided dual head floppy disk drives and a 300 baud modem. I could read faster than that.

I'd come home from school and tie up the home phone line for an hour or so, connecting to local messaging systems in town (I realize now that my old @$$ would have to explain what a BBS was to anyone who asked). There were no usable programs, but they all had text files and messages from around the world from older tinkerers. These were files and plans for things needed to mess with the phone system and cable networks.

Turned out that, yes, it was educational!

1st Hard drive I ever bought was 20 meg and cost $200 this was about 1988 I think