Stuff were incredibly expensive back then?
No it was super ridiculously cheap.
My A500 had 5 MEGABYTES of directly addressable ram + a hard drive.
My A2000 had 9 MEGABYTES of directly addressable ram + a ridiculous amount of HD storage.
And stereo DMA fed hardware double-buffered interrupt driven music.
And 32-bit multitasking.
Add up how much that cost to do on a Bill Gates compatible PC. Around $8 billion (google translation: IMPOSSIBLE in 1989)
Now any price I paid was fantastically cheap.