I remember back when I had a TRS-80 and to turn it on you had to type in a bunch of commands.
I remember back when games came as hex code in magazines and you would type them in by hand (read: hours) and then play them and not turn the computer off because you had no way to save the game.
I remember loading games on tape (used audio tapes) and it would take like 30 minutes to load a game.
I remember getting a floppy drive (5.25") and thinking "wow. this is SO much better than tape".
I remember the very first time that I saw a hard disk (1981-1982 or thereabouts) and it was about the size a toaster ("full-height") and held a whole 10MB and it was unbelieveably fast compared to a floppy disk. As I recall it also got about as hot as a toaster and it cost something like $800.
I remember the very first computer that I built myself was a 386 and the day that I finished building it - the very afternoon - I had it in a full height tower case and I was on a 6 story building in Santa Clara, CA, when the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit and I watched the computer rocking back and forth on top of my desk and in the middle of this huge earthquake and I jumped across the room and grabbed the computer and then fell on the floor hugging it (yes, this story is completely true).
I remember my very first major overclock was an AMD 5x86-133 which I overclocked to 200MHz and it was stable. TAt the time, that seemed like about as fast a computer as I would ever need.
I had a trs 80 too. On the weekends, my and my cousin would check out basic programming books at the library, and spend an entire night typing it in. 5 pages of code, to find out 2 command lines would not translate over to color basic, with no workaround. An entire night wasted. I can also remember begging my parents to pay for touch tone service so I could by a 300 baud modem to get on the local bbs. They thought I was crazy wanting touch tone service, when all they had was the old black and a few green rotary dial phones.
My next step up was a Laser Turbo XT, with an 8088 processor, running a whopping 8mhz in turbo mode, 4mhz non turbo mode. It was sold at Sears, one of the IBM clones at the time. Later on when hard drives were coming into play, I can remember how much a 40mb drive was king of the hill, and we wondered how in the world a person could use up that much storage space. F19 Stealth Fighter, The Hunt For Red October, A10 Thunderbolt, after I bought a 3.5" disk drive for almost $100.00 to put in it.