That's not a relevant question. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to play acoustic guitar on the streets, sure, you don't need much. That doesn't meant that everybody wanted to be creative in that way.

Some people (milions) wanted to make records like the Beatles or Kraftwerk, or Led Zepellin etc. Some even wanted to write orchestral scores like they heard from John Williams.

That you can write a song on a $20 ukelele doesn't mean that wanting to write a 5-piece band with reverbs, compressors, clean sounds and 24 channels is not a valid artistic endeavour.

That you could buy an 4-track and record some demo-quality material doesn't mean that the PC hasn't lowered to barried to entry, to the point that someone can produce in his garage/bedroom songs that could only be produced with tens of thousands of dollars of studio time.

The same with movie/video production. At best you had access to (expensive) 8 or 16mm film and mighty expensive specialist tools. Now you can have a full blown editing suite, and HD or even 4K cameras for a few thousand dollars.

>Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC.

Postdated and made possible by the personal PC. I didn't say it appeared instantly along the PC. First there was cheap MIDI and sequencers, something that helped tens of thousands of electronic musicians.

>And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs.

This is dense. Of course "machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs". NOW THEY ARE. That's my point.

Again you somehow assume that I said that all those things were made possible the very moment the PC was available -- whereas what I said is that were made possible BY the PC.

The $100,000 price tag is the equivalent of what you get, in sound mangling capacity, with a $2000 PC and a $500 DAW -- recording, reverbs, etc.

Actually, there were synths, like the Fairlight that only ultra rich artists could afford, people like Gabriel, and that costed $25,000 to buy. Now you can get the same exact specs as an $10 iPad app.

>As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills.

Perhaps you've been confused. Artist creativity in the sense of what options artists have to create things. Artists including industrial designers and such. Not in the sense of "how creative an artist is", e.g the quality of his output.

This is about how enmpowering the PC has been for lots of artistic endeavours. E.g not if Bach is better than Depeche Mode, but that Depeche Mode could get the sounds they wanted in the first place.

>Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power".

Not really, it just means "more people than before get a go".

If something was available to X and now is available to 1000*X, that's democratization.

May I remind you that ancient Athenian democracy, one of the fullest and most direct examples of democracy in how the election body operated, excluded women and slaves?