I remember when a BIG Hard Drive was 40mb

[Edbear]

A mate of mine still uses his 286 and a dot matrix printer...
I was a late comer to computers so my first was a Pentium 100 with a superfast 8 x CD ROM and dot matrix printer. Cost over $5k!

[FROSTY:Me]

I'm from the era where a pocket calculator was a slide rule.

[riffer]

First computer I had was one my dad and I built from instructions in an Electronics Australia, with a hex key pad on it like an alarm system. Had to program the whole thing in one go from machine code. Urgh. I wouldn't do that now. Progressed to a Commodore 64 at home, and maintaining the school PCs - a Challenger 1P (which I upgraded to 4kb of RAM) and an Apple II.

Started work at Government Print with an IBM System/360, with the 2311 disk drives (a whopping 7.25MB!) for a while until they got some 3340s. Then they got a Vax 11/750. We were running about 50 VT220 terminals off that and it worked pretty well (except when my mates and I were trying funny stuff and continually fatalled the unit, killing every users processes).

Then to IBM XTs and ATs, Macintosh IIs, Sparcstations. SGI Indys and finally grunty PCs. I also recall having a Macintosh IIci with dual Rocket Acceleration cards, and a number of Quadras, Powermacs, and G3s, G4s, G5, etc...

And the MB size has just gone up and up. This morning I threw another 1TB drive into my games PC, which already has 1.5TB of storage in it.

It ain't gonna stop... and I'm only 43.

[riffer]

If you want to talk about expensive PCs I remember a mate of mine purchasing an Apple Macintosh Quadra 900 with 256MB ram, a 2GB hard drive and a 21 inch colour CRT monitor in 1991. It also had a fair bit of Avid gear in it too for video editing.

It cost him $75,000!

[EJK]

Pentium MMX was my dawn of computing era. So advanced compared to you guys.

[Edbear]

I'm from the era where a pocket calculator was a slide rule.

Yup! They were phasing out the Abacus with the slide rule when I was at school. I reckoned the Abacus was easier to understand... Couldn't understand why they switched from base 12 to base 10 either and I didn't like decimal currency when they brought that in as well.

If you want to talk about expensive PCs I remember a mate of mine purchasing an Apple Macintosh Quadra 900 with 256MB ram, a 2GB hard drive and a 21 inch colour CRT monitor in 1991. It also had a fair bit of Avid gear in it too for video editing.

It cost him $75,000!

Ouch!