It's an eye-opener looking back at previous prices for hardware. That 10gb hd for $290 in 1998 seems like a lot now. Back in 1985, I bought a 20mb hd (megabyte, not gig) for $400. My supervisor yelled at me complaining, because he had paid $500 for his 10mb hd in 1984. In 1991 I bought a 1gb hd for $1000 - it was huge at the time. A 6MHz PC around 1985 cost me $3000. Back in 1979 a floppy drive cost me $600, and I think it held less than 90kb (kilobyte, not mega). In 1978 I bought 16kb of RAM for $250 - it had just been dropped from a previous $500 price - and that was a lot of RAM.
The prices you kids are paying now are dirt cheap in comparison!
Plus now your computing power and internet access and network access is ultra-portable. Compare this to being chained to a desktop. With phones, tablets, ultra thin laptops.....
In my book an ipad has pathetic computing power but still its 100X better than what you were stuck with just a short time ago