My parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of

My parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and no graphics acceleration at all beyond whatever was integrated on the Pentium 3. It cost $2000 back then so probably almost $4000 today. My high end 4090 rig cost a bit more than that to build for comparison and that machine is better than 98% of machines out there today.