Nothing fancy, pretty basic. I remember talking to a geek who mentioned something like 512mb of ram, and I was aghast! WHY would ANYONE need that much..at the time I think mine had about 4mb of ram

Now I have two computers a laptop, a tablet and one of those tiny thing with too many apps included..

I marvel at how much computer power can be had on the cheap today.

Discs were $10 apiece. We bought a box of 10. We were at the head of the line once, at least we thought we were. We're at the back of the line now. I read my book in the doctors office while everyone else is buried in their phone, fingers whizzing. I don't even know how to take a picture with my android, which I only have because my sister shamed me into it. I'd be much happier with my old flip-top, see no need for all those apps. In case you haven't guessed, I have no apps, am pushing 83 and have a landline. And am very happy with my desktop computer.

I gave up on my smart phone after 4 weeks and went back to my flip phone. Much easier to carry and use.

And I wish Verizon would provide me with a landline instead of this goofy cell modem for my desk phone. (In case you younger readers didn't know, land line sound quality and reliability is much, much, much better than any cell phone ever made.)

Newer isn't always better.

Big advantage when my office place went "paperless", and I was the only person who knew anything at all about computers.

Today? I am totally lost. My 12-year-old nephew walked me through a virus issue over my landline phone. At Thanksgiving, there were thirty people all engrossed in their smart phones. People traveled hundreds of mile for family dinner, and then they play online games with strangers.

Land line and "smart" phone. although it doesn't seem too smart to me. I still have to press all the buttons. I take the cell when I leave the house and any calls to my land line are forwarded to my cell. I still like the land line, what can I say? I'm an "old timer" myself and some things you just can't part with.

I was asked to take a picture with a smartphone, could not. I need buttons. I cannot handle all of these hovering over the screen and "pushing" a button. I almost returned a car that I purchased three years ago because I could not handle the screen. Tried to switch radio channel and realized how dangerously I was driving. Thankfully, another KIA sales lady showed me that there were buttons to move up and down the pre selected radio stations.

He was born in 1929.

He gave my brother the password to his iPhone, so we could notify his contacts that he had died. He had a Windows 10 Desktop. (I couldn't figure out his desktop, cuz I was using Windows 7) He also had tablet, and a laptop. He also had a fancy slide scanner. He wasn't on Twitter. He had Facebook, but rarely used it. (He didn't trust social media, but had old family/friends he kept in contact with via FB)

those were the days

and that price is correct

"The computer you want costs five thousand dollars!"

I remember upgrading the memory from 4K to 16 K. $400 plus tax. Early '90's.

I believe I bought it in 1991. It must have been a 386, and had 40Mg of RAM. It would have cost about $2,000.

A couple of months later the computer place where I bought it called me up and offered to upgrade the RAM to 80mg for $75. What a bargain! Of course I jumped on it.

A few months ago I bought three thumb drives for twenty bucks, and each one has 14Gb of memory. How astonishing is that.

in the 1970s.

That's over $50 million for a GB!

I gave it away 10 years ago to some guy who needed a computer. It still worked great; at one point I added a firewire port to it.
I tried to hold on to it as long as possible. I loved that computer.

I remember both of us marveling how anyone would ever fill a 40 MB hard drive.

(yes, MEGAbyte)

and about $3500 for a Macintosh with 128K of ram in 1984. I got a printer with it for that price and paid a premium because I was living in Japan and had to pay a premium for an American computer.

Boy, 128K seemed like a lot back then!

(I've still got them both.)

in 1982.

like you were paying a LOT for storage, but not much computational horsepower to go with it ...

I purchased my first computer in 2000.

I paid about $1,000 for it. It was a Dell Optiplex, which isn't the best. It had integrated graphics and we separately purchased and installed an extra internal hard drive for back up and added more RAM. (It was a pain to connect the internal hard drive - Master/Slave/jumpers - yikes!! )

In 2004, I purchased another Dell, (I believe it was a Dimension) for about the same price. It was a better computer. We purchased an external hard drive instead of another internal.

I just purchased another desktop computer and paid about about $1,000. The tower was on sale for $750, but I added a 20 inch monitor for $130. I need to purchase a better keyboard. My external hard drive seems to be dying, so I will probably need a new one.

You seem to have a large hard drive for 1997!!! Also 64 MB RAM seems larger than average. I think when we did the RAM upgrade, on my Windows 98, we may have gone up to 64 MB. Also Win NT was a better system and you also have Linux Red Hat. Did they throw in a monitor?

I'm not that knowledgeable about CPUs, but from what I see with your 1997 computer, it looks like it was top of the line for 1997.

The rest of the system, the monitor, keyboard, mouse, SD card... I already had. A Raspberry Pi leaves your 20 year old computer in the dust.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

The most I've spent for a computer and accessories, in inflation adjusted dollars, was for an Atari 800XL. I still have all my old Atari stuff and more Atari stuff I picked up later in thrift stores for pennies. Those machines live on, emulated on my Linux Desktop. One click and I'm back in the 'eighties again playing Pengo or reading my senior thesis. Okay, I never read my senior thesis, I'm sort of embarrassed now because it was a less-than-subtle "fuck you" to those who had rejected the senior thesis I wanted to write.

Second place in expense was for a shopworn 386 I bought for $300. That was retired at Windows 3.1.

After that most of my computers have been diverted from the e-waste stream. I wipe the drives, install Debian, and I'm good to go. The last Windows I used was 98SE on a duel booting dumpster 486. The 98SE serial number was on a sticker on the bottom of the machine. I first signed onto DU with that machine.

company I worked for our latest gear had racks of 1.3 GB drives, around $1K each. Was absolute state of the art ... high end mini-mainframes. Now I have a couple of terabytes in my desktop for pennies on the dollar. I like today's prices far better!