this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Definitely. The prices were much higher (accounting for inflation) though, and to make it worse with everything moving so fast it all was obsolete so much quicker.
Today you can ride a high end gaming PC 6-8 years. Imagine taking a Win98/EarlyXP machine to Windows 7. Nah.
But we lost the excitement with the longevity.
*looking confused in Linux user since 1998* ;-)
My first real PC from 1996 was a Pentium 100 which admittedly wasn't cheap (~1800€ today including inflation), but had an easy and low-price upgrade path to a K6-2 400 with decent amount of RAM which was later being used by my father until 2010.
It's super cool to use stuff like that. What did he use it for, word processing? I don't think the average consumer of 2010 would've found it adequate though. That was the height of flash-filled websites and multimedia.
My dad did mostly some word processing and web browsing on his favorite bunch of sites.
Processing power was less a problem in the end than the very limited memory (192 MB), even with the super-small-footprint Linux Distro.
You have to remember, 2008/2009 also was the time of the EEE-PCs, that weren't that much more powerful compute-wise, but already had at least 1GB of memory...