At some point later, my high school had surplus Powermac 7500/100s that were gifted from Nortel and I managed to snag one, paired it with a USR 56k external modem and it was a million times better than that Celeron econobox.
Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
One of the first computers that was mine (as opposed to being a family computer) was a summer 2000 iMac DV with a 400Mhz PPC G3, 10GB HD, 128MB RAM, and 15” 1024x768 CRT. When I upgraded to a new iMac in 2005, it had a 2Ghz PPC G5, 500GB HD, 2GB of RAM, and a 20” 1680x1050 LCD.
That’s a ridiculously huge jump for just 5 years’ time. I can’t imagine where things would be now if that rate of advancement had continued through to today.
They often came with nice (Dell rebranded) Trinitron monitors although I think that was usually an upgrade over some base monitor.
What a miserable machine that thing was. It might’ve been an upgrade on paper but between Windows 98 and the terrible hardware it was running on, it was a hopelessly crashy buggy mess that rendered any performance advantages it had over the Mac entirely moot.
Within a span of 6 months we sold it and replaced it with a Dell Dimension 4100 that cost 3x as much and was much much better, especially after replacing its stock 98SE install with Win2K. We never bought bargain basement computers again after that.