> At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability.
Yes! There's a post we wrote on precisely this phenomenon with John Carmack as the main character that you might find interesting.[1]
TLDR: There was a time when people were willing to spend (literally) tens of thousands of dollars on ultra-premium hardware in order to compute on hardware a few years ahead of the market.
For example, John Carmack spent $23K for a NeXT workstation on which he made Wolfeinstein 3D, Doom I & II, and Quake. He also spent ~$10K on the world's first 1080p monitor, which he used to program the Quake trilogy.