My dad started us on a 286AT in 1987 because he was using mainframes at work and refused to buy anything prior to that as they were too slow compared to his terminal at work. That one was around $2K. My first PC was a Pentium 1 and I think my hard drive was about 512MB. o_O It cost a grand without a monitor. That was purchased when I couldn't use the hand-me-down 486 for my college work anymore (because it was too slow).