Just to add my experience to the pile: when I went to college I was able to convince my parents to get me a custom PC from a company called GamePC. Among the specs in 1998:
400Mhz Pentium 2
128MB
Nvidia Riva TNT
3DFX Voodoo2
CDRW (4x4x24 I think)
Syquest SparQ (Awesome, but had major issues)
Internal Zip Drive
Just a ridiculous system for the time. Quake 2 and Starsiege Tribes were really popular in our dorm and that system was just perfect for it. Also popular was burning lots of pirated games, so we'd order CDRs in bulk from this really random site overseas. High quality "gold" CDRs and they were far more reliable than any of the ones you'd find in stores in the US for about half the cost.
Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them.
edit: corrected the amount of memory
/end reminiscing about a simpler time
Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them.
edit: corrected the amount of memory
/end reminiscing about a simpler time