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).
i think it was my Compaq tower. 512mb of ram, a (socket 478) pentium 4 a very early nvidia geForce that used an AGP slot
this computer is notable to me since it was where i started making hardware changes. i bought a 20 gb maxtor drive and a copy of SuSE linux. then somehow i figured out how to make it multi boot between XP and SuSE
it really got me thinking about computers more past the general interest in them i had previously
Definitely the 2nd hand Amstrad PC1512 I bought when I started Uni in 1990. The previous owner had changed one of the 5.25" floppies for a 3.5" one, and fitted a 49Mb HD. It was a game changer, as it meant I could work at home, occasionally through the night to meet deadlines that I had endangered thanks to my wanton student lifestyle.
The Amstrad cost me £500, which seems a lot when you see what that would buy nowadays, but for comparison one of my fellow 1st year students had spent £1200 on a new Austin 286! Meanwhile, here in 2026 I’m typing this on a 2015 iMac 27", 5K retina screen, i7 chipset, 32Gb RAM & 1Gb SSD that I paid £110 for…
For me, seeing speeds and memory capacities go up and up seemed normal for computers, and what really impressed me was seeing the number of processor cores grow the same way; I kind of got the impression we would just continue to see like, 2 or 4 cores going forwards after that started to be a thing, and that adding too many would get too complicated. I think the moment I realized that that wasn’t the case was when I found out about AMD Threadripper. I’m typing this on a computer with 14 physical cores and that’s still wild to me.
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).