[firmgently]

Although consumerism was already in full effect in the 80s people hadn't been conditioned into anything like the crazy update cycle we're in nowadays. I suppose the business world may have been different (seems unlikely?) but at least in home/personal computing people weren't buying new computers every 2-3 years - people did keep them for years. Maybe technically they'd have been devalued but if you're still using an item and it's doing its job the resale value isn't a consideration (in the late 90s it was still common for people in eg. sales offices to be using thin terminals with green-screen monitors, despite Windows PCs being readily available).