I started with a TRS-80 Level I with 4K RAM and a tape drive. To do graphics you had some large grid graph paper on which you drew the image, then toggled the individual pixels. It ran BASIC, but due to memory limitations, it didn't run MUCH.

The first computer I bought was a 286 with a 44MB HD and something like 2MB of RAM. It might have only been 1MB that I later upgraded, but it was hard to make use of 1MB, let alone 2. Many people were using that upper MB as a RAM disk that loaded programs during boot because programs were so slow to load from the HD of the day. I thought I was cooking with gas, though, because of the size of that HD and the fact that I got 256 color VGA! I had never actually SEEN 256 colors on a computer screen before, and had some real doubts as to whether or not it was really possible. I was used to the 4 color CGA graphics that the high end computer at school had (there were two of them, I think, along with dozens of monochrome), though one guy had an EGA card that his monitor barely supported.