1969: Used BASIC in math courses in college on teletypes to a campus-wide time-sharing system to a mainframe that, I think, ran on tape, and had the memory potential that could be on the order of a stack of floppy disks.

1976: In architecture school, used FORTRAN, writing programs to IBM cards (hanging chads and all) handed over a counter to "responsible" staff that fed them into the black box somewhere.

1986: Began using an architectural CAD program (Autotrol) on a Mini-VAX system, running some version of UNiX. Staff, including me, wrote routines to fill in the holes in CAD software; it was very "extensible" and reasonably accessible.

1988: Architectural office got Macintosh SE30s, distributed around the place for doing correspondence and such. CAD moved to a set of Sun workstations running BSD UNiX. Around this time, I got (used or refurbished) our first personal home computer, an Amiga (Commodore product, which the office was using for presentation graphics), that booted from a 3.5" floppy disk (gronk, gronk, gronk) and we soon were doing email and bulletin board stuff online, also through a Unix-based internet provider -- text interface only. But the OS and monitor were in color! Then the kids discovered computer games, and the battle for computer use was on.

1993-94: Parents bought us a Macintosh Quadra 605 and monitor for Xmas. I think it had a 20 Mb hard drive; what a gas!

1994: I went to an office that was doing its first project on CAD. I organized getting AutoCAD for Macintosh (System 7 then), and had 5 or so Quadra 840 AVs with a peer-to-peer "Appletalk" network over plain old phone wiring. It worked great, for that many computers, having each job on a different workstation, but accessible from anywhere in the office.

Eventually I migrated to using Windows computers for CAD in offices, probably Windows 95 and AutoCAD r14, generally on Dell workstations. Tolerated, but not enjoyed very much throughout the years -- though Windows 7 and then 10 have been much more tolerable.

1999 or 2000: bought our 2 kids each an iMac G3 (the translucent-colorful extraterrestrial looking thing) with matching keyboards and mice. They were over the moon. We still have one of them in the house. We got a refurb Mac 840AV, I think, at the same time, with a larger color monitor.

2004 or so: our family got MacBooks, the plastic ones for the kids, and an aluminum one shared between me and my spouse.
Now, everyone is on about their 3rd MacBook, I guess. But the wonder of it all is sort of gone, and we're nostalgic for the simplicity of earlier systems.