I never spent that much, but I upgraded a 4MB RAM 486 in '94 to 8, then 16, and then 32MB (at $200 each, waiting a few months between each purchase while RAM prices were dropping). Once I got to 32MB (the most the PC could hold), I could run Linux, X11, emacs, gcc, and bash at the same time without swapping, which was about a 10X speedup.
At home we had 16 mb at that time on a PC Pentium clocked at 90 Mhz. This much RAM was insane at that time. I'm impressed Apple allowed for so much RAM.
I remember that some sticks would come out damaged so I used to test them with memtest86. I solved an issue where my PC would restart suddenly because of a bad stick.