On this day in 1986, I got my first PC: an original, 1982-vintage IBM PC, with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 256 kB of RAM, twin 360 kB drives, a 30 cm 80 x 25 character green monochrome monitor, and a steel clickety-clackety keyboard.

The laptop I'm writing this on, 25 years later, has a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB of RAM, an internal solid-state 250 GB drive, a 36 cm 1280 x 800 pixel monitor with 16 million colors, and a silent keyboard. And this laptop cost less than half what the PC cost in nominal terms, which makes it about one-sixth the cost in real terms.

Twenty five years of computing, and I still don't have a fast-enough computer.