I never spent that much, but I upgraded a 4MB RAM 486 in '94 to 8, then 16, and then 32MB (at $200 each, waiting a few months between each purchase while RAM prices were dropping). Once I got to 32MB (the most the PC could hold), I could run Linux, X11, emacs, gcc, and bash at the same time without swapping, which was about a 10X speedup.