Ahh, it's so neat to see how things have progressed over the years. I'm only 19, but even in my lifetime, and more specifically the amount of my life that I've actually been cognizant of technology, I've seen huge improvements.
I don't have specifics, but the first computer I really used was crappy even for its time. This must have been around 2007 or so. I was only 9 then, whoa... Intel Celeron, and it really couldn't run MS Flight Simulator X that well. The funny thing is, my dad still uses that same computer to this day. I kid you not, it takes a good 15 minutes from power button to usability. That's nothing though. My dad also still uses, on a daily basis, an HP Pavillion from 2000. Windows ME. No idea the processor, but I think an 80GB HDD. It was a stunning computer in its day, and amazingly, it still does everything he wants it to (email, printing stuff, whatever else he uses it for). It's ironic too because he also has a pretty modern smartphone and also uses a very decent Lenovo laptop that's just a couple years old, and works with modern software at his job every day. I don't know anybody that has the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality more than he does.
The next computer I recall using was my mom's laptop, a bottom tier Compaq laptop with an AMD Athlon 64x2. No idea the speed, I just remember that it ran Vista, was slow, and got
extremely hot. That and, my sister also had the exact same laptop, and
BOTH crapped out within the same month. Quality design for ya.
Then I got my first computer, a little HP laptop with some sort of Pentium dual core processor. Meh. Decent hardware for everyday browsing but the HP bloatware killed it!
Over the summer of 2012 I built my first computer. Triple core AMD Athlon at I think 3.6 GHz, GTX550 ti card... Gaming machine on a budget it was; I think I did it all, including monitor and OS, for under 400 dollars. I skimped way out on the motherboard, which is almost certainly why it crapped out randomly when it was only a couple years old.
Now I have my current laptop, which I bought in the summer of 2013. Even now, 4 years later, it's overkill for what I need. It's a Lenovo Y500 with a quad core 3.2 GHz i7 and some sort of nifty mobile GPU (that I never use, since I'm not a gamer; no idea why I bought the thing). It is overkill, but it'll last me a good while longer. As a matter of fact, I really rarely use it in laptop configuration. Right now, as almost always, I have it closed on the other end of my desk, connected to an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It's really nice though, to have the flexibility of a desktop for most things but portability when you need it.
I've actually been looking at buying some silicon wafers from eBay lately, just as a decorative/collector/super cool sort of thing. A lot of the wafers I'm looking at come from the later 80s or early 90s, and it's fascinating how far technology has come since then. Especially in terms of fabrication feature size. Even around 2004-2005 we were looking at the transition from 130 nanometers to 90 nanometers. And now we're down to what, 11 or so? And the Intel 4004 started at 10
micrometers, or 10,000 nanometers! Incredible stuff.
Yes!