> Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming.

Gotta remember inflation here.

$1K in 1995 was roughly equivalent to $2K now and wouldn't have been a particularly "good" machine then.

In 1982 the Commodore 64 started at about $600 bucks, also roughly around $2K today.

If you outgrew that, beefier machines back then were A LOT. It was easy to find $2k+ towers and (especially) laptops even into the 2000s, and a lot of those would be $5K+ equivalent today.

And a unix workstation in those days could be high 4 or even 5 figures, depending on configuration.