This era had something called "layaway" -- put a percentage down and then you could make random incremental payments and take it home when it was fully paid for.

This was used much more frequently than children of the era might remember.

Which people often do with PC builds. Not much different in terms of cost.

Depends.

If my memory serves me well, I did a $320 build somewhere in ~2010 for a friend. For the giggles I launched F.E.A.R. on it. It worked.

What's the price of a decent gaming PC these days? About the same?

Define 'decent'.

Since ~ 1995 a decent PC (runs everything, not a mind blowing rig) were always around $2000 with monitor, with a sharp decline to $1000 around late '00 and a slight increase since then but there is nothing a $200 GPU with a decent CPU and enough amount of RAM can't what a rig $4000+ can't do, only slower.

I still remember what I paid for a PC in 1997.... $3500 for a dell with 128MB of ram, 400 MHz Pentium II, 10MB HD, zip drive, 21 inch monitor... My wife's company paid for half of it.. otherwise would have bough a cheaper one... 2 years later you could buy all that for less than half with a 1GHZ P III