LOL - Look at this comparison of PC Games from past to present

First computer I used had Windows 3.11 on a 600 MB hard drive, Pentium 75, and 8 MB of RAM.

That doesn't include the 14.4k modem.

 

Oh crap, if you go back far enough, I remember my Radio Shack MC-10 with 4kB RAM, 300 baud modem, and tape deck to store files on... lol.

 

LOL this is TOO funny!

 

The HP-48SX calculator I used in college was more powerful than the Commodore 64 my family had when I was in high school (and about as expensive)...3D PacMan almost ruined my college career...it was so much more interesting than some professor lecturing on how gear teeth developed from triangles to involute to protect them from undue stress...now, I have a PSP that can not only emulate C64, but it can do Genesis...and it fits in the palm of my hand...I'm almost envious of what my son will see tech-wise before he gets too old (60? 70?) to care...

We did programming on the Apple IIe's in high school, but gaming/hacking was on the Commodore 64 at home...last day of school, they let us bring in our home computers for Game Day...and the Apple couldn't compete with the C64...not nearly as many titles, as many good titles, and graphics/sound weren't even close...the only game I ever enjoyed playing on an Apple IIe was Aztec (Indiana Jones knock-off)...

And the Commodore's 1541 5.25" floppy drive's digga-digga-digga was music to the ears...the thing was as large as most modern small-ATX desktops and weighed as much...imagine my surprise when I got home from two years in Brasil in 1990, and my dad had brought home an Apple Macintosh II from work...

'Where's the floppy drive? What's a hard drive? Why don't you stick the cartridges in the back of the keyboard anymore? What the hell is a mouse doing on the screen and what's this stupid thing with a ball in it controlling it?'

 

Perhaps they were MB hard drives but they still listed them as KB to make them sound bigger.. again, I was a kid and I don't really remember that well.

As far as I am concerned "popular" meant people started buying computers in quantity. The pentium revolution seemed to be what really got the GENERAL public into computers, where as most people I knew didn't also have a 286. All of the schools had Apple or IBM, but mostly Apple. Of course I went to military schools so the funding was much better than regular u.s. public schools. Back then it seemed like almost noone had a personal computer at home unless they were a geek or well off.