My first was a hand-me-down PC-AT clone. 286 10 Mhz, 640K RAM, and EGA graphics. It wasn't much, but it could play Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and even Catacomb 3D (at an appallingly low framerate that I was somehow able to tolerate). I couldn't conjecture what it cost, but I didn't get it new anyway.
In 1994 I got my first "new" PC. It was a 486 at 66/Mhz, 4MB of RAM, and whatever VESA-compatible video card would have been hot shit at that time. "Multi-media PC" was the big marketing term at the time. I reckon it was around $1300. Cutting-edge titles at the time included Doom, Under a Killing Moon, and Myst.
And, truth-be-told, that was the last time I ever had to buy a completely built new desktop, I just upgraded. At first it was a K6 (AMD's fake Pentium upgrade for 486 motherboards), more RAM, a Voodoo card... I replaced every part of that computer 10 times over again, and here I am today.
Before the advent of dedicated 3d accelerators, "gaming pcs" didn't really exist
Nah, by the time we got to VGA cards, CD-ROM drives, and 32-bit CPUs (around 1993), PCs were comfortably doing stuff that were the envy of consoles at the time.
The most "pc gaming" you would get was if you purchased a Gravis Ultra Sound with its gamepad
Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. The Gravis UltraSound MAX was one actually the first upgrade I made to my 1994 system. And an OG SoundBlaster was the first upgrade I made to my PC AT.
GUS was a huge upgrade for gaming sound. It made all the difference in MIDI-based games. I absolutely loved that thing.