Never had an interest in having my own computer until the Pentium came out. Monochrome monitors were for work. Early color monitors suffered from terrible resolution that made my eyes go wonky. Could write better programs than most of what I saw available back then.
When I saw Mech Warrior run on a Pentium that changed everything. Computers became fun instead of just a work tool.
First computer was a Pentium 1 and either a 133 or a 166, don't remember. It was a Dell and very expensive, like $2k or more. It had maybe a 14 or 15" monitor. The rule was that if it wasn't fun it didn't belong on the computer. Get that office crap out of here!
Fairly early on there were some SCSI drives, followed by 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptors, followed by huge capacity TB drives, followed by SSD in combo with a storage drive, plus a ZFS array. Incredible storage improvements.
Notable CPUs Cel 300a (OCed of course) on a BX MB that was kept for years and upgraded a couple times. There have been a few AMD CPUs, mostly cheap dual cores like the 4000+, there are a couple Rigor setups and a Hexa-core 1055. On the Intel side there were P1-166, the Cel 300a and then a 600 coppermine something, maybe on a slot to socket converter? Never a proper P2, or P3. A P4@1.3GHz, Core2Duo @ 2.33 and another @ 3GHz, i5-750, i5-2500k, i7-3770s. Incredible CPU improvements.
Somewhere there is already a long list of video cards as well.
My current setup is by far my favorite and it was no where near the most expensive. Got a big ole flat screen, plenty of computing power both GPU and CPU, but the rig just sips electricity with the 22/28 nm parts. Love it.
Wireless printer is in the other room. The progress in all areas has been mind blowing. With the expensive old printers you had fan fold paper, printer ribbon, terrible print black and white print quality, and the noisiest prints heads ever. Now we print full color and can make copies, scan documents, send faxes, and read SD cards all with one cheap printer combo machine, amazing!
The 14" CRT has grown to a 27.5" flat-screen that is bigger than console TVs were back in the day! TVs have grown from 19" to 52". The newer stuff isn't just bigger, it is higher res and is more reliable too.
Only had a few laptops. Had a Fuji Life Book with bad bright pixels and no DVD player. Learned how to DivX movies down to CD size so they would play on that thing. First sample compressed video I ever remember seeing is Jason Lee saying "f a duck", don't even know what movie that is from... The next lappy was a desktop replacement with a desktop CPU that ran really hot and had like 15 minute battery life. This was replaced after being stolen by a wonderful 1.5GHz Dell Centrino with a 7200 RPM drive and a 9600 pro turbo video card. Nice machine in spite of the relatively slow single core CPU. The graphics card and fast HD made it a much better machine than the previous one. Currently running a i5-450 with a 5650 GPU.
Learned to program FORTRAN on punch cards, back in the day. Then had to learn DEC VMS or whatever that crap was back when DEC was still alive.
We still have a couple DEC Alpha machines at work, still in service!