Not to get around to disclosing your age, but I was wondering what the oldest PC you've ever worked on was. I'm not talking about consoles / TV-plugins like Atari / Comodore. Something you actually used for WORK.

Mine was bought in 1987. An IBM compatible XT running at 8MHz, 640kb RAM, 360kb Floppy, 720kb Stiffy, 20MB HDD and a monochrome Hercules Graphics card. Used it with DOS 3.3 to begin with, running some stuff like PFS Write for word processing, Lotus 123 as spreadsheet, R:Base for database system. Later started using Q&A for database due to its (still) unsurpassed natural language query system. Was also my first introduction to programming using Logo / Basic.

Still later (around 1989) dropped all for the combined Ability+, first thing where everything worked together and could be interlinked (i.e. a spreadsheet inside your document with mailmerge from a database). Not to mention my main business program: AutoCAD, though upgraded to R9 & then R10 running on a 386-25MHz, still DOS though - 4MB RAM (using ACad's Extended Memory to address the +1MB barrier), 40MB HDD and a Bernoulli Drive for backups. Started using ACad's built-in macro/scripting language AutoLisp for extending tools inside the program - fell in love with it.

Also started my CS degree and was introduced to Pascal, SQL, etc. A bit of a let down in comparison to AutoLisp & Q&A.
Then came the Win95 "revolution" with ACad R12/13 and "lots" of RAM on a Pentium and the race between software wasting performance and hardware trying to keep up (or was it the other way round ) was getting into full swing - or at least that was my feeling: Needed 64MB RAM just so I could open a drawing which I created years ago on something which only had 4MB - else the PC would simply crash after loading for 30min. AFAIAC the 90's was when programmers got lazy - writing software which was not just buggy, but extremely inefficient (at least in comparison to the old stuff which needed to fit into highly restricted RAM/Storage/CPU speeds and tended to "Just Work -and- FAST").

The whole 90's felt like a step backwards in terms of actual usability, sure you got "nice" graphical interfaces. But all the good stuff which was already available much earlier seemed to have been forgotten. I still blame MicroSoft for killing OS2 Warp and introducing their abomination of W95 - goes to show: Marketing trumps Performance. Anyone remember the VHS / Beta Max wars?

And before some bitten fruit fanboi jumps up about the GUI available in the 80's, try looking at where they stole their system from: Xerox in the early 70's. And even they "stole" it from a much earlier GUI called GRAIL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLRy4Ao62ls

Now THAT's a CAD for you - and it was made nearly 50 years ago and still the "new" stuff doesn't come close to what it could to then! See why I mention our software engineer's are LAZY? I'm actually sorry for people only getting into computers now, thinking these are "state of the art" ideas. If they only knew! See this as a gauntlet thrown down to the "programmers" out there: Stop redoing old stuff and doing it badly! Get to at least the capabilities they had 50 years ago, but preferably "invent" something NEW and/or better FFS!