Digital Home Thoughts: How The Best Of The Past Stack Up

"From the original 200MHz, 8MB-of-RAM 1996 Dream Machine up to this years 12-core, 24-thread, 24-gigs-of-RAM version, the ultimate computer has grown exponentially more powerful. But that's not much of a shocker (we've all heard about Moore's Law, and all) so we decided to delve deeper into the history of the Dream Machine. We collected data about the vital statistics of each years machine, and made a bunch of graphs showing how they've grown."

Looking at the charts at Maximum PC really helps give a perspective on how much computing has changed and advanced over the years. On paper, the numbers as significant, though in some ways, I feel as if computers have not changed that much. They still cause problems at the most inopportune times and I still find myself waiting for it to complete various tasks. Of course, the problems are a bit less frequent, and the tasks I have it do are much more demanding, so it seems as if there's a law to match Moore's Law (or the common mis-interpretation of it) where what one demands of a computer will generally expand to fit and sometimes exceed the available computing power. Did any of you have one of the "bleeding edge" computers when they came out? Was it worth the thousands of dollars spent?