[philiplu]

My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET!

It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.

[wat10000]

And if you managed to go out and spend a million dollars on a computer instead, it wouldn’t be all that different from what you bought here. The CPUs would be very similar, similar RAM and storage, etc. It would be a lot more powerful, but that mostly comes from scaling horizontally. More RAM, more CPUs, more everything. But it will run the same sort of software and run most of it about as fast, just more of it at once.