Computer people take it for granted that prices collapse. Of course the GTX1050Ti that I bought a couple years ago is now a third of its selling cost. I paid a lot of money for a Matrox G200 graphics card almost exactly 20 years ago... what would you pay today (in a strictly utilitarian non-collector sense) ? If my son asked for it, I would hand it to him, not implying he's rich, but that graphics card was made long before he was born, so its not terribly valuable beyond collectors.

The era of the linked article was an era of transistorization. His vacuum tube amp reminded me of the research lab grade Tektronix 545-series o-scope I owned with 500 watts of vacuum tubes and those weird ceramic and gold plate standoffs instead of PCBs, my Heathkit SB-102 vacuum tube ham SSB radio, and my motorola land mobile receiver and transmitter strips converted for the then new 2 meter ham radio repeater fad (which has since mostly disappeared). That o-scope in the mid 50s cost someone about one new house, by the mid 80s I got it for $100 with all the plugins, while living in a $100K house, figure it dropped in value by a thousand over a quarter century. My dad paid about a mortgage payment for the SB-102 when it was new, maybe 15 years later I got it for free when he upgraded, just too many microprocessor controlled features with no change in performance specs..

Note that with computers you can't do anything in 2018 with 1998 equipment, it won't work or the software and protocols are not designed to be compatible on purpose. However literal research lab grade work in the mid 50s is roughly equivalent to average dude work in the 80s so in the late 80s paying $100 for a file cabinet sized o-scope was reasonable because it was totally useful and practical and I learned a lot using it, if not terribly portable or reliable (burning out tubes, need to realign after replacement, etc)

There was also an interesting aspect to 70s stagflation, everything before 1980 cost ten times as much, so that also excited the depreciation. In the 50s $10K would buy a nice house, but once people got used to paying $100K (and now $1M) a dollar isn't worth what it used to be.

Also the nostalgia of time smooths things over, but a 1950 car was kinda rusted out and worn out by 1959 so people get weird feels about a kid driving a 1950-whatever automobile when that thing was pretty worthless at the time the kid had it in 1959, and this extends to electronics. I'm sure someone saved a lot of money for a long time to buy the very late 60s Sony black and white 7 inch TV I had in the early 80s as a home computer monitor, and to have that as a kid as my computer monitor during the moon landings would imply I was quite rich; but in 1982 or so that TV being used as a monitor would imply a bit of poverty, maybe, and in a nostalgic sense it gets blurred into "70s" and I must have been a rich kid, LOL.

This is already the case with computers. Nobody does anything new or exciting or more productive in nearly a decade. There are tail-fin like style changes. Someday a teen in 2030 will get a 2020 laptop that cost a huge pile of money in 2020, totally handles the workload in 2030, and some dude in 2070 will accuse the teen of having been rich because that laptop cost a boatload of money in 2020. Of course in 2030 with a scratched up screen and dead battery and deeply un-stylish exterior the kid only had to pay $50 inflation adjusted equivalent, so the kid was not necessarily rich.