I'm mostly talking quite a while before that. When I bought my first IBM PC clone in the early 80s, it was probably $3K or something like that and it didn't even have a hard drive. (I bought a 5MB hard drive with company money around the same time and it was $5K all by itself.)
I think the general idea was right, except I would put the price at $2500-3000 as the sweet spot. Back then if you spent $5000 on a system you'd be able to buy it for 2/3 that price in six months to a year. Anything less than $1500-2000 was near obsolete.
