alt Hacker NewsMy first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000)
My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
The announcement reminded me of article John Dvorak wrote around the same time. 1GB hard drives had just come out, and he asked what all the extra space would be used for. Even as a young teenager, I remember thinking how short sighted that comment was. That was before I realized how the tech press tends to get stuck in local optimizations, and can't understand the bigger picture.
It's all a good reminder that cutting edge today doesn't stay cutting edge very long, and the world figures out how to squeeze every ounce ounce of power out of hardware. (Also, yes, that leads to bloat...)
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similar, but I got the 486 DX2-66.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!
What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.
Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.
I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
Gotta tack on to this thread showing appreciation for parents. We could never afford new computers in the 90s, but luckily my dad could bring home obsolete equipment from work. We were thus always at least a generation behind. I remember my friend's Pentium feeling like sci-fi compared to our 386, but my goodness it completely molded my life!
Later, towards the end of the 90s, those sci-fi Pentiums were obsolete, so I got a few to run "that weird Linux stuff" on. Since it was considered junk, nobody cared what I did with it. To this day, if I happen to hear Metallica play and there's early winter's first smell of snow in the air, my mind will be transported back to that school night I secretly stayed up wayyy too late and discovered SSH for the first time. Haven't looked back.
Thank you, dad! I just hope general computing devices owned by regular people are still natural by the time my children come of age.
> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me.
True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably more like 60% of it for the year.
Obviously it paid off in that it set me on the path for my career, hard to make any other investment as good as that, but who would have known that at the time? I'm glad that there were so many ads positioning computers as being educational and not just game machines; even though in reality I think it was learning about the computer to make the games work that taught me way more than any educational software ever did.