Indeed, in my case, I bought a Sanyo MBC-550 computer with MS-DOS, a Zenith monochrome display, and an incredibly slow daisywheel printer, for almost exactly 1000 bucks. My use case was pretty narrow -- word processing and programming.

The year before, someone demonstrated a Lisa at my college, and of course I was excited by what I was reading in Byte Magazine (though it was over my head), but the early Mac was just out of my reach. The Sanyo seemed like a step above my mom's Apple II.