PC Pro have been doing a bit of a 20 year thing

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2014/08/14/20-years-of-pc-pro-our-first-a-list/

What is interesting is the cost of PCs

Their A List fastest PC

1994 £2800
2014 £1260

Now average (pre tax) wages / week
1994 £260 (£12.5K pa)
2012 £480 (23K pa)
(from the ONS)

so the "best" PC in 1994 cost you 11 weeks (pre tax) income but now only costs just over 2 1/2 weeks income

I have always said that ever since I have bought PC's (from the mid 90's) that I have spent around the £1000 mark and that that has not changed in 20 years

I only ever bought the bare minimum when it came to building PCs for my needs - you don't need much horsepower online or typing a word document

Typing a word document? You just said that to make out you're not on the internet all the time

No, think back to when most people didn't have laptops, never mind tablets. Other than Solitaire there wasn't much else you could do with a low-powered PC on dial-up at a penny a minute!

And I've got an entire collection of Word docs from recently. Work dispute to things being sent to Kindle, reminders...

I was trying to read that article (but kept getting interrupted). As I recall, the two most expensive things people generally bought were a house and a car. The third most expensive item back then was a computer. The cost of a computer was generally in the ballpark of £1000-2000. We bought our first PC in 1996/7 and it cost around £1400 IIRC, and even then it was just a reasonable spec (apart from the 1GB HDD). Upgrading to a 15" monitor would have been expensive.

I didn't know anything about the Internet until 1998 when we had access in our IT dept. AOL and Compuserve would send out free CDs, the idea was to offer trials. We didn't have a modem and didn't bother. We weren't online at home until ~2001, and that was via a 56K dialup.

I think my first Mac (a Peforma 630 with the optional DOS 486 daughterboard) cost about £1400 if memory serves. 14" display and everything.

I first went online in 1980. I was sitting at a terminal in East Grinstead and was chatting with the operators in Houston.



My first PC was a ZX81. I went through several PCs until I got my first MS-DOS / Windows PC in 95. A Gateway P90 with 8MB RAM and a 17" Trinitron monitor. That cost around 2K, If I remember correctly.


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I have found that

Average House Price (1996) was £55K
Average House Price (2012) was £163K
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/indices-nationwide-national-inflation.php

so back in 96 the PC was approx 5% the cost of your house whereas now its under 1%

We started off with an IBM desktop PC in 1994/5 (possibly one of their last in the consumer market?). God knows what the specs were, but something makes me think it cost between £7-800. That was the first 'proper' PC anyway - I remember my dad soldering chips into Atari STs before that.