This is false. Created account just to rebut.

While it may have been true that it was technically possible to assemble a PC for $500... good luck. In the real world people were spending $1500-$2500+ for PCs, and that price point held remarkably constant. By the time you were done buying a monitor, external drives, printer etc $3000+ was likely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#:~:tex....

Or see Apple Mac 512 introduced at approx $2800? One reason this was interesting (if you could afford it) was the physical integration and elimination of "PC" cable spaghetti.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_512K

But again having worked my way thru college with an 8 MB external hard drive... which was a huge improvement over having to swap and preload floppies in twin external disk drives just to play stupid (awesome) early video games, all of this stuff cost a lot more than youre saying. And continued to well into the 90s.

Of course there are examples of computers that cost less. I got a TI-99/4a for Christmas which cost my uncle about $500-600. But then you needed a TV to hook it up to, and a bunch of tapes too. And unless you were a nerd and wanted to program, it didn't really DO anything. I spent months manually recreating arcade video games for myself on that. Good times. Conversely, if you bought an IBM or Apple computer, odds were you were also going to spend another $1000 or more buying shrinkwrap software to run on it. Rather than writing your own.

Source: I remember.

> This is false.

The CPC 464 is the first personal home computer built by Amstrad in 1984. It was one of the bestselling and best produced microcomputers, with more than 2 million units sold in Europe.

Price

£199 (with green monitor), £299 (with colour monitor)

> But again having worked my way thru college with an 8 MB external hard drive

that was a minicomputer at the time, not a PC (personal computer)

> Source: I remember.

Source: I owned, used and programmed PCs in the 80s

The Commodore 64 launched in 1982 for 595 bucks. Wikipedia says "During 1983, however, a trickle of software turned into a flood and sales began rapidly climbing, especially with price cuts from $595 to just $300 (equivalent to $1600 to $800 in 2021)."

I believe this was the PC of the ordinary person (In the "personal computer" sense of the word.)