In 1994, my late father-in-law bought a new computer. That then brand new sparkling piece of hardware now is my 31 year old 80486 retro PC. When he gifted it to me in 2020, he also handed over the original invoice, as if the warranty was still valid. Also, who saves a twenty something year old piece of paper that becomes obsolete after two years? I’m glad that he did, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this.
Below is the scanned version of the invoice printed out by Veldeman Office Supplies in Hasselt:
According to the KBO public search, The company went bankrupt in 2013 after 28 years of faithful service, even though their head o…
In 1994, my late father-in-law bought a new computer. That then brand new sparkling piece of hardware now is my 31 year old 80486 retro PC. When he gifted it to me in 2020, he also handed over the original invoice, as if the warranty was still valid. Also, who saves a twenty something year old piece of paper that becomes obsolete after two years? I’m glad that he did, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this.
Below is the scanned version of the invoice printed out by Veldeman Office Supplies in Hasselt:
According to the KBO public search, The company went bankrupt in 2013 after 28 years of faithful service, even though their head offices moved a couple of times. My father got his original 486 somewhere in Brussels, and after that, I remember we always went to Bells Computercenter in Diest, a specialized hardware store that still exists today! When the first Voodoo cards dropped, Bells is the place we ran to. It was that kind of place with the cool looking Creative sound card big boxes in the front windows to attract attention. It seems like a strange choice to buy a PC at Veldeman, a store that mostly sells general office supplies.
The invoice details the exact purchase: 1,00 amount of the following:
Veldeman PC Mini Tower
80486DX 40 Mhz / 256Kcache
4 Mb Geheugen
3,5" 1.44Mb Diskdrive MIO Kaart Local Bus
Conner 210Mb Harddisk
Cirrus Logic 1Mb VGA LB
VISA SVGA Color LR Mon.
Uitgebreid klavier AZERTY
Veldeman muis met matje
I received the computer with 8 Mb of RAM installed, not 4, but perhaps my father-in-law upgraded it later in the nineties. See my Reviving a 80486 post for photos: the CPU was stamped with an early version of the Microsoft Windows logo, and below it, it proudly states “MICROSOFT WINDOWS COMPATIBLE”. That must have been the main reason for the purchase, as my father-in-law mainly used it in conjunction with Windows 3.x spreadsheet tooling for keeping track of expenses and general calculations as part of his job as an mechanical engineer.
Buying a new PC in 1994—on the 16th of May, to be more precise—turned out to be a very risky business. In the nineties, technology moved at a dizzying speed. Windows 95 was just about the corner, Intel’s Pentium became more and more affordable, the AT system got replaced by ATX, the motherboard layout changed, AGP got introduced pushing VLB into obscurity, … In less than a year, the above purchase would become obsolete.
That’s quite painful for such a hefty price. The invoice totalled to an amount of 49.899,00 BEF1 or 1.236,96 EUR. Taking inflation into account, that amounts to 2.435,04 EUR in 2025, which is more expensive than the most beefed out 15“ MacBook Air you can get right now boasting the M4 CPU technology with 10 cores, 24 GB of RAM, and 512 GB SSD storage. That MacBook will stay relevant for more than six years—my last one managed to keep it together for eight, and the one I’m typing this on is almost six years old. The 486DX Mini Tower sold by Veldeman lasted less than a year.
To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the most performant machine you could get your hands on in 1994. It didn’t even properly run 1993’s DOOM: you’ll need more raw CPU power (and preferably more RAM) to push beyond ten to fifteen frames per second. But if that PC already was more than 2k in current EURs, you can imagine that a true high-end machine was only reserved for the wealthy. According to DOS Days UK, in 1994, a mid-range PC typically came with a DX2-66 with more RAM, so technically speaking, this invoice here is for a low-end PC…
As a result, my father-in-law faithfully clung on to Windows 3.1(1) while others moved on to Windows 95. My wife recalls they didn’t buy a new one (or upgraded the existing one besides the RAM slots) in quite a few years, while my father bought a new machine early 1996 that was capable of rendering Quake.
Keen observers will notice that the Veldeman PC Mini Tower did not come with a sound card. Popular Creative Sound Blaster cards were sold in big bright boxes for more than €100 without adjusting for inflation: needless to say, the good ones were crazy expensive. Nowadays, people don’t even care any more, and the built-in sound chip that comes with the motherboard is usually good enough.
It’s remarkably difficult to get hold of historical price data on 1994 PC hardware. The Computer Paper Vol. 7 No. 7, an archive from computerhistory.org, contains an interesting “Grand Opening” advertisement from 3A COMPUTER WAREHOUSE in Markham, Ontario, Canada, listing similar hardware:
An excerpt from computer hardware ads. Copyright The Computer Paper magazine publisher.
A “basic” OEM Sound Blaster would have set you back for 139,99 CAD—that’s 268.74 CAD in 2025 or 166 EUR. Note that only the PCS 486DX Multimedia CD on the bottom left comes with what seems to be a generic “sound card”. IBM PCs simply didn’t come equipped with decent sound capabilities: many of us Apogee game fans have the iconic speaker sounds permanently burned into our brains.
The IBM PC advertised at the top left most closely matches the hardware from my invoice and came at 1789,00 CAD—3.434,30 CAD in 2025 or 2,122.59 EUR. That’s quite a bit less but hardware was/is more expensive in Europe but I’m probably comparing apples with oranges here. Besides, the Canadian ad didn’t state it comes with a free mouse mat!
Other magazines closer to home are MSX Computer Magazine (no ads containing prices), Computer! Totaal (vol. 3 is from 1994 but I can’t find a scanned version), and the one I remember my grandfather buying, PC-Active. Unfortunately, my parents threw out all copies after cleaning up their elderly house years ago. I’ll try to be on the lookout for copies or might pay the Dutch Home Computer Museum a visit that also collects old computer magazines.
Luckily, my Dutch retro blogging liaison Diederick de Vries managed to procure the following scan of PC-Active issue 49 from May 1993 containing ads of 486 PCs:
AMBRA PERSONAL COMPUTERS: gun je verstand de vrijheid (give your mind freedom). Copyright the PC-Active magazine publisher.
The mid-range PC advertised is a 486 SX (25 Mhz, 100 Mb disk space, 4 Mb RAM) for 65.126,00 BEF, while the high-end one decked out with a 486 DX2 (66 Mhz, 200 Mb disk space, 4 Mb RAM) was for sale for the staggering amount of 109.090,00 BEF. That’s 5.453,90 EUR in today’s money—wowza. Can you imagine spending that much on a computer? Of course, in 1993, the DX2 was brand new and within a year it became much more affordable. And in another year it was rendered irrelevant by the Pentium…
In a way, I consider myself lucky to have grown up in that golden age of molten silicon. Hopefully today’s Ryzen CPUs will be remembered as fondly by my kids as I remember the 486 and early Pentium/Celeron/Athlon era. I highly doubt it.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we sensible Belgians use . as the thousand separator and , as a, well, comma? ↩︎