Well..... intereting reading.
My first introduction to computers was a Canon programmble desktop calculator at school. It had one line of neon Nixie tubes (that is what those little bulbs with the individual wire frame numbers are called). So after being introduced to it at a double maths that straddled lunch, I spent the entire lunch time writing a program which made it look like a digital clock displaying the time. They were so expensive the school only had 2 of them.
Then when I was in the Army we had a maintenace computer that had punch card terminals and no screens in the workshops. You had to gave 3 cards to insert into the reader, one to identify you, one to identify the job, and one to identify the task (book in, maintenance, parts, book out etc.)
Then in '86 my young bride did a training course in WordPerfect and wanted a home computer to practise with. So off we went to CCS computers on Gympie Road in Strathpine and after much deliberation and a little arguing for the right to spend that little bit more $500+) to get the newest monitor and video card we walked out with a 8088 8 MHz processor PC with 1 whole MB of RAM and 2 (count em) 2 x 5.25 inch floppy drives and a copy of MS DOS 4.2 (if I remember correctly) and an EGA monitor (16 colours) and an OKI 9 pin dot matrix printer for the princely sum of over $2,500. And no hard drive.
We didn't have a copy of WordPerfect but eventually acquired one
from somewhere. The 2 floppies came in handy because WP took up 2 360k floppies so you could put both in after DOS loaded and load the whole program.
Before we got WP I played around with GW Basic that came with DOS 4.2 converting codes from magazines to get it to work on DOS.
In the early 90's I bought a 2nd hand 20 MB drive for $70 that had a faulty head and was able to low level format it so we then had a 10 MB hard drive.
Around this time the 286s and 386s were hitting the market but SWMBO didn't think that was a necessary expense so I found a microprocessor chip ($80 from Dick Smiths) which would fit into the 8088 slot and allowed me to increase the clock speed to 10 MHz with only the occasional overheating shutdown.
Eventually the old beast wouldn't stay alive and we got a Pentium 4 with 16 MB ram and a 120 MB hard drive and a new monitor capable of 16 million colours. :wow
Now we have an i7 laptop with 2 x 1 TB HDD and 4 GB RAM which we bought a couple of years ago for less than we paid for the firsy PC. On top of that we 2 HP XEON workstations with 4 GB RAM and two HDDs each. Can't remember the size, but I rescued those 2 from a skip at work. My son has handed down his Laptop which is a centrino 2 and we also have a colour scanner inkjet and a 2 tray Lexmark laser (I rescued this from the skip at work too) its fault was a hidden paper jam between the finishing rollers. It originally had a duplexer but that died last weekend with perished rubbers.
Then of course there are the 2 smart phones and the tablet.
Going back as far as the 80s though is 30 years.
