Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support.

> The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.

The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.