I remember buying a 486 DX 66 Mhz from a local computer shop, and it was within my parents price range because that computer shop assembled the PCs themselves. And the best thing about it ... it was a standard, and I could find tons of cool shit to run on it.

Of course, I live in Eastern Europe, maybe you guys in the US have been more lucky in regards to access to mainframes / Unix operating systems ... I wasn't.