Less than a year out of college, I finally purchased my own computer with my own money. Previous to that, I had been using an IBM Aptiva I bought at CompUSA a couple years earlier that I had paid for most of, but that my parents helped to fund. (Let me tell you, that 133MHz processor was a screamer!)
On February 10, 1999, I bought a Gateway. And just today, I ran across the receipt for it. Check out these specs and prices:
My First Gateway Computer
The most painful part is probably the $550.00 I spent on a 19 inch monitor. It wasn’t an LCD display, either. (Here are the full specs.) My next computer about two or three years later would have that.
The computer, itself, was $1666.00. When I think about what that kind of money will buy in an iMac today, it’s crazy. People complain about the expense of Macs, but look at what I got for $2600 12 years ago. It wasn’t top of the line at the time. For $2600 today, I could get the top of the line iMac with a 27″ screen.
Yes, I include the price of the printer in there, because the iMac I’m typing this up on right now came with a free printer/scanner/copier/fax machine combo unit — after $99 rebate!
Still, there was nothing cooler than the assemblage of brown boxes with black cow spots arriving at the office, was there?
Reminds me of the Dell I got for two grand back in 1999. I had to pick it up at UPS, and the many boxes left no room in the car at all for anything other than myself and my 6-year-old daughter. That was a crazy night, but what a thrill to hook it all up and everything actually worked!