I didn't use computers in the 80s but I can tell you as a '90s kid, 30MB anime episodes in RealPlayer were SO HUGE and took half a day or longer to download on my shitty dial-up. I had to burn them to CD to back them up and delete off my hard drive because there wasn't space to have my full library on there, and back then CDs were like... monstrously huge, in my mind, and a total godsend.

I'm like, the same age as you, but sometimes I think about how long it used to take to load a static webpage on dialup and then look at how an hour-long YouTube video can now be played with zero buffering and my brain explodes a bit.

My first computer came from K-Mart in 1986. It had 16 kB of RAM and I later agonized over buying the upgrade to 64 kB but couldn’t afford it.

If I used the “high-res” graphics mode (320x192, 1-bit colour), that consumed fully half the machine’s RAM, and it was difficult to write a meaningful program using what remained.

I still own that computer and am incredibly fond of it.

What was the question?

I'm about your age, but when I started really using computers circa 2005 it was a Windows 95 machine, and I've maintained a similar distance between my technology and current day ever since (typing this on a 2013 laptop for example). My first hard disk was 500MiB and, and I only got more than 100GiB of storage in 2016, so 1TiB SSDs still feel weird to me. The fact that you can apparently fit that on a µSD card, wow

Born 84 and they make me upset because huge huge amounts of space but they are so unreliable that cameras have slots for TWO when one inevitably fails

Also file sizes and systems just bloat to fill the void so there's less real gain any time storage media gets better. Same thing wrt to processors and memory etc

YES! Around the turn of the century, I specifically remember my uncle talking about how he bought a computer for my cousin with RAM still measured in MB. GBs were still unfathomable at that point!

not even that old, got some serious whiplash when I realized "oh, an 1TB M.2 SSD won't cost an arm and a leg" and "wait cheap TB-range SD cards and thumb drives aren't always a fake?".