IIRC, back in 1991 I purchased a 'bare bones' mini tower from a warehouse distributor located near O'Hare airport, just north of Chicago. The thing consisted of the case, P/S, and motherboard along with a 486SX-25, all for about $700, plus shipping. There wasn't much in the way of used peripherals, so I watched 'Computer Shopper' like a hawk. By the time I outfitted it in with a VGA card, color monitor, sound card, I/O card, RAM, keyboard, serial mouse, and Windows 3.0, I easily had 2K or so invested or maybe more, as I probably didn't want to remember. The modems were another thing back then. I had a 300 baud in my 1000SX and used that for a while and later settled on a 14.4K when the prices came down. It seems that every time you turned around someone had a new modem offer with a new features and speed (my last dial-up was a 56K external US Robotics with Mindspring until DSL showed its ugly head).
The high end 486's were more or less out of the ball park, price-wise, for the casual user. One of my neighbor's taught CAD/CAM at Ford HQ and another was a mechanical engineer, who always had the current AutoCAD. Both always had the latest and greatest hardware and it was all made possible with the use of a tax write-off. So, the 486-25 served me well until I eventually landed an AMD Anthlon something or another. Since I had full use of PC's at the work place, it was hard to justify the expense of an elaborate personal computer thing at home. Then along came gaming.