386sx 16mhz was my first (not family owned) personal computer that I received for college as a high school graduation present for software engineering. This was before having the internet in 1990. One of my favorite things that summer was, once I discovered Fractint, I loved making animated zooming fractal movies. It would take about 5-15 minutes to generate a single frame of julia at 640x480 resolution with my state of the art super cool video card with 512k of ram that could do 256 colors (most computers were still on 16 colors at the time). Then you'd zoom in a level and slightly move the viewport and render a new frame, and repeat for a few days. All manually. It took forever to make a clip even 5 seconds long.

I saved up for the math coprocessor, and that thing was a game changer. It cut the processing times by at least half. I can really, really appreciate what a small, modern day cell phone is capable of in terms of compute and graphics power. Even smart watches are more powerful than my first computer.