I remember that year very well!  In fact, I built one of the SWTPC M6800 machines that is pictured.  PCs cost about the same then; but you have to realize that we also got a machine that ran at about 1mhz, had b/w graphics (if we were lucky), no disk drives and averaged about 32K (not meg!) of memory.  Monitor?  You probably used an old TV set.  My wife kept asking me what it was GOOD for! 

But at least we had BASIC!