I just took a trip down memory lane with my dad - the person who brought us home a brand new Apple IIGS ca. 1988. I remember him being extremely excited that it had a massive 256 KB of RAM. (Expandable to 8 MB. Eight!)
He also mentioned how happy he was when the bank he worked for added 10 MB external hard drives to some people’s workstations. He worked in the data vault, and those drives freed him from dealing with the terminals they were attached to. (Or, to be more precise, those terminals’ users.)
And I remember our neighbor saying in 1993, of my mom’s new Gateway 2000 with a 1 GB hard drive, “oh, you’ll never fill that.” He gave us Doom II on six floppy disks, and I was astonished; I didn’t know one computer program could take up that much space.
I remember when we got our first computer with a hard drive. No more putting in floppy disks just to turn it on! (Well, the TRS-80 didn’t need floppy disks to turn on; we didn’t have any kind of disk/tape drive for it at all, and had to type in everything we wanted to do at the BASIC prompt. But between that and the hard drive were a couple of computers that needed boot floppies.)
Based on the responses here, I’m a bit younger than you all The first major spec bump I remember being impressed by was going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB on the family computer probably around 2006 or so. That computer had a 40GB hard drive, so when I got my own laptop for the first time in 2012 or so I was blown away by having 640GB. I pushed that machine to its limits for sure, I remember playing GTA 4 on it (at a pretty low framerate).