If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely didn't rely on Pentium processors.

Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.

In the mid 90s mere mortals ran a 486DX2 or DX4.

Pentium 60/66s were in the same price tier as expensive alpha or sparc workstations.

That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000..

In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10, earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money. We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50 or something like that and it was fine enough for him to play most DOS games. Heck, you could even run Linux (I know because I ran Linux in 1994 on a 386SX 25, with 5MB RAM and 20MB disk space).

> The mid 90s was pretty scary too.

If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad.

You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.

Are you sure? From what I can tell it's more like 500 USD RRP on release, boxed.

Either way, it was the 90s: two years later that was a budget CPU because the top end was two to three times the speed.