Children, children, children. Sorry this is long, but I'm summarizing almost 30 years.
I've had:
Timex-Sinclair 1000 The pic doesn't do it justice, it was TINY. Maybe 6 or 7 inches wide. And useless. If you moved it while typing (which was impossible to avoid) it either froze or reset.
Commodore VIC-20 with a cassette drive. Took 4 or 5 minutes to save or load a program 2 or 3 K in size.
Commodore 64 with disk drive and Commodore color monitor. System still works today, some 22 years!! I use the monitor as an S-Video monitor in my editing suite. And speed!!! A decent game, like Beachhead, which loaded into tens of K of RAM, would load from diskette in only 2 or 3 minutes!
I was working at a K-Mart at the time, and the appliances department sold VIC-20s and the
TI 99/4A, which was 199 bucks by the time K-Mart started with them, but couldn't really do anything computer-ish until you bought the expansion chassis and disk drive, which ran it up to over a thousand bucks. Sold the crap out of the computers, but people were buying them as game consoles, buying games for the cartridge port.
I left K-Mart and got a job in a "home computer" store, which sold C-64s,
Amigas (the first machine I saw that used 3.5" floppies), and a
Sanyo Intel 8088 machine which was sold as PC compatible, but wasn't even close. We even had a
C64 portable, with built-in display, that we couldn't get rid of. (Might have been because it was nearly a thousand bucks!) It was a C64, a 1541 disk drive, and a 5" color display, in one "suitcase" chassis. Since I worked there I had access to whichever I needed at whatever time I felt I needed it.
When they fired me for copying C64 games for my friends (What? me?!??!? No way!!!) I sold stereos for a few months, then got on with the company I still work for. This was 1986. Now it's like a career or something! Anyways, in those intervening years I've had everything from a green-screen IBM PC-XT (with a 10MB hard disk!!!! Lotus 1-2-3 only take 17 seconds to load!!!!) through the revolutionary PC-AT (6-MHz 80286 proc!) through numerous new PCs and portables as the technology grew.
I built my first LAN with IBM's PC Network, based on CATV technology. I built my first Netware server when Netware came on two 5.25" floppies and would run on an 8088. I remember Windows 1.0, which competed with IBM's Topview. Let's just say the right program won. I had OS/2 (32-bit OS!!!!!) on my desktop when I had my first 386, because I could do stuff while formatting a floppy. DOS and 16-bit Windows were locked into the format task.
I remember laser printers, starting with Apple's first LaserWriter. Until that point, printing was dot matrix for speed, daisy wheel (Google it, or just accept my word that they were slow and NOISY) for letter quality. I was ASTONISHED by the first inkjet I saw, and it was black only, the HP Deskjet.
Not long before that, portable PCs started getting really cool. The first clamshell (what they were called before "laptop" was coined) I saw opened up to a bluish monochrome LCD display with 40 lines of 80 characters, no graphics. But it could be powered by a
battery! You didn't have to have a power plug! What would they think of next?
Well, color, for one. The first color laptops were hideous, but we couldn't keep them in the store. Everything on the picture ghosted, the displays were multiplexed so poorly and the LCD panels were so slow. They were dim, and limited to EGA resolution.
Well, now you needed color printing, and color inkjets took off. Also, programs got too big for floppies, what with all that graphics capability. The biggest app I saw distributed on floppies with MS Office 95, on 33 diskettes. And those were a special HD format, with 1.7 MB per disk, instead of the standard 1.44! So enter the CD-ROM. Talk about hope you can get it to work. Almost none of them did, at first.
Years pass. PCs get faster, with 486, Pentiums, Pentium IIs and IIIs, then P4 (not Pentium any more) and all the versions and developments of that. Now you take for granted that you can play a game that renders photo-realistic 3D moving environments in real time, you store enough music in a few gigabytes that a lifetime couldn't listen to all of it, then you burn it onto your own CDs (but not anymore, now you iPod). If music's not your thing, you collect your digital pictures, fix them up in Photoshop or its numerous clones and competitors. maybe you're like me and do video on the side, the occasional wedding or whatever, and you've got some digital camcorders, Firewire, and Premiere, Avid, or Final Cut.
None of that stuff was possible even 10 years ago, and some of it was unimaginable when I started over 20 years ago. Color photographs out of the printer in my house, that I fixed on my own computer!??!?? HA!