In about 1994 for about $3000 I built a PC with a Pentium 90 with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive that was somewhere in the 80 to 120 MB range. Running Linux, it w

In about 1994 for about $3000 I built a PC with a Pentium 90 with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive that was somewhere in the 80 to 120 MB range. Running Linux, it was much faster than the Sun IPC, IPX, SPARC 5, SPARC 10, and the single processor SPARC 20 systems I had access to. This may be because I was the only user on my PC and the workstations were commonly used via telnet. In any case, my personal computer was faster for me than almost any machine that I had access to as a sysadmin in a well funded academic computing center. The 386sx that I acquired a couple years earlier had a 60 MB hard drive. Surely the hard drive in that was not thousands of dollars. If you needed gigabytes of hard drive space at the time, that cost thousands. More modest drives were available for a few hundred.