I first started using computers at work in 1980, a Hewlitt Packard HP85, about the size of a cash register with a 5" screen and printer with paper not much wider than your checkout ticket.
In 1981 I bought a Sinclair ZX81 with 512Kb of on board RAM, this was plugged into your TV and an audio cassette recorder as a storage medium. I wrote programs in Basic, and won a competion on Radio West - (now Brunell Radio or GWR) which was transmitted over the air at night, - radio stations did not broadcast all night then!
Every hour on the hour they would broadcast computer programs for a variety of computers which you recorded onto an audio cassette - most home computers of the day used these.
I upgraded this with a 16KB Rampack - can anyone remember these? - wobble wobble - crash, everyone that had one had bits of foam or something stuffed around the pack and elastic bands to stop it moving.
After a couple of years I progressed to ZX Spectrum with the rubber keyboard - squidgey keys that got stuck under the keyboard template, I bought a printer to go with it, the paper was about 3.5" wide and metal foil coated, the printer worked by a stylus traversing the paper and an electric current would be passed causing a spark, leaving a black mark on the paper - much as a dot-matrix printer does. Sparks and smoke - whoooooh it's working properly!
I upgraded to the ZX Spectrum 128 with a proper keyboard and the microdrive, this was an endless tape in a tiny cassette, about 1"X1.5" and 0.1" wide- despite it's size it gave much faster loading and saving, remember the mulicoloured boarder flashing away while loading/saving?
This was now about 1986 and I bought a modem and joined Prestel, sort of teletext style internet with message boards and software downloads, you could send/leave messages to friends. This also allowed online shopping, Kays catolouge was among the first - you used your home shopping account details and got billed through the post.
When the Amiga came out I got one with a Star LC100 colour printer - home computers were starting to become grow-up machines, it used 3.5" discs
In about 1992 I was given an old IBM with 5.25" floppy, they were floppy. This was a DOS based machine - Microsoft was "inventing" Windows then - despite the Amiga and MAC's running in a windows enviroment.
I remeber going on a training course to show how the modern PC would be able to multitask etc., the screen shots of the multi-tasking were taken from an Amiga, because it was better at it at the time.
This was given to my son for his course work at university, A couple of years later my daughter had also gone to university and needed a computer for course work, so I bought a second hand 486 SX 25 with 4MB of RAM, this I upgraded with another 8MB at a cost of £85!!!- computers were much more expensive then, I also fitted a CD ROM.
This left me at home with the now aging Amiga, when I saw an advert for an AST P75 case & motherboard, I bought this and started attending computer shows to get the necessary parts cheap. I successfully rebuilt this machine and used it for a while.
My next machine was a TX pro P200 bought from a computer mag, after using this for a while I investigated what maximum speed processor it would take and fitted a Cyrix P333, with extra memory there was a great improvement in performance.
I have built many machine since for the family and friends with my lastest, built a couple of years ago now, based on an ASRock AM2XLI-eSATA2 motherboard and AMDSempron 2800 with 1GB DDR ram. I overclocked this from the standard 1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz. This worked fine for a while until the plastic mount holding the cooling fan broke allowing the fan to swing into the onboard sound chip. I fixed the mount, disabled the sound chip and slotted in a PCI sound card. When I get around to it I'll build a new faster machine.