[HoppyHaus]

Adjusting for inflation, $2.98 in 1977 is equivalent to $15 nowadays, which means that we've knocked this out of the park. On Ebay you can get a cheapo Android phone for under that amount with more storage than detailed on the article. And hey, gfortran is free!

[Legend2440]

Modern computers are stupidly cheap and fast. Moore's law has given us $2 microcontrollers faster than the Cray supercomputers of old.

[helsinkiandrew]

> Adjusting for inflation, $2.98 in 1977 is equivalent to $15 nowadays

And games have substantially more effort put into them - there aren't many developed by teenagers after school in a few months, but by huge teams over many years. $50 for GTA is much better value than $2.98 for the games available in 77.