Yeah, my $4000 486-DX2 with 8MB RAM and a Weitek P9000 graphics card was amazing(ly expensive)!
I still regularly use a 2012 laptop, but if you were using a 9-year-old PC back in 1991, it would be a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088, or something like a Commodore 64.
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks/But it was obsolete before I opened the box/You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique/ Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great/If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight.
These days, my parent's 8-year-old computer with 8GB+ of memory, a high-end (for the time) CPU, and an SSD is good enough for everything they do.
I remember selling my gaming computer at college every 3-6 months and building the new hotness and it being NOTICEABLY better each time.
Smartphones came further, obviously, starting from nothing in 2006m but I see 2014-2015 as the start of a plateau. When we started seeing glass-backed cases and folding screens, I knew we'd reached the land of diminshing returns.
I was stuck with a 386/16Mhz/40 megs hd, and a whopping megabyte of ram.
At least it taught me that it was sometimes worth optimizing my code...
Sometime aroundish 1988 I paid $600 for an 80MB hard drive, out of a $12K/yr stipend. Good times.
286 + 1MB RAM + 40MB hard drive.
This was 1992 and it was valued about 1000$.
First computer that was strictly mine was a CoCo 3 in 1986, and the first one I built entirely myself was a 486-66 back in 1993.
Yep, we definitely remember those first machines.
I thought MS Extended Basic on the CoCo was pretty cool.
Ended up moving to Apple ][ a few years after that, but still have very fond memories of the CoCo, even though everyone else I knew had something else and liked to refer to my computer as a Trash 80.
3.0 would crash every 15 minutes on average. 3.1 would crash every 45 minutes on average. 95 would go a day at a time, 98 would go several days, XP was stable a month at a time when there weren't major exploits or bad driver behavior.
...and so on. I may be overstating the impact SLIGHTLY, but 3.0 really was crash prone to the point magazines heavily pushed people to 3.1 when that came out, and 95 was definitely significantly improved over that, and so forth (skipping ME, of course) until XP.
XP, on the other hand, practically never crashed, unless you had bad drivers. Just like Windows NT4 & 2000 before it.
12.5 MHz
1MB ram
2x 5.25" floppy drives (one HD, one DD)
10MB hard drive
HGC (640x200 monochrome) with amber monitor.
That was in 1992 and it was an abysmally slow system.
I spent literally HOURS trying every single driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that worked - it was an OAK videocard with the bare minimum of RAM needed.
His machine also came with a Windows graphics accelerator video card, which was a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Back then, you could see the difference in redraw speeds between accelerated and non-accelerated very easily.
These days, 2D is so simple that nobody even thinks about whether your card can keep up or not.
Back then, even in MS-DOS you had a lot of questions about if your card could do VESA modes, undocumented video modes, etc, and sometimes you'd need SciTech Display Doctor to get those modes. Linear framebuffers weren't commonly supported, and getting the best possible performance required that.
In 1996 it was very cheap.