The late, great TRS-80

You make a very good point here. I remember watching the prices of TTL chips in ads in the back of Popular Electronics and other magazines, and watching them continue to drop, this being before LSTTL and all the variants that came later on. When computers came along, again I watched prices, as before that it was only big iron, only available to those who had followed the proper path (I didn't :-), and again, the systems were out of my reach. I also noticed a trend that capabilities increased, features were added, but there seemed to be a "floor" of some sort below which prices didn't seem to want to go. At least not until computers and the parts to make them with turned into commodities, which is what we have now. I never did reach the point of being able to afford $1000+ for any of those systems, though I did end up with a bunch of those systems much later on, when they weren't considered to have any value.