2001. I had four computers I owned at home. Two in the basement, rack-mounted: One was the 4U home server, with three of four disk drives. Did exactly the same thing my current home server does (DNS, DHCP, NFS, Web serving, files, backup). It ran Linux. The other in the basement was the firewall and router, a 2U rack mount, running OpenBSD. In our "office" at home, we had two desktops, one was a 486-50, the other some sort of Pentium. One with a 17" Sony Trinitron, the other with a 20" monitor. Both Linux, although at least one could dual-boot into Windows (because being compatible with Windows apps like Word and Excel was simply a necessity). We had wired Ethernet all through the house.
For office work, I brought a HP laptop home (at the time, I worked in HP's building 1). It had a docking station with a PCI slot, which contained a fiber channel card. A long fiber cable was run to the basement, where I had a JBOD with about a dozen disk drives, 9 GByte each, I think 7200 RPM. The laptop was perfectly capable of doing interesting research work and high IO workloads (thousands of IOps, hundreds of MByte/s). I had some of the first LCD displays that HP sold at home on the laptop; it was much nicer to use for computing than the tube monitors. On the other hand, using the laptop "on my lap" on the sofa or in bed or on a comfy chair was horrible, because the internal screen was awful (I think 1024x768), the keyboard was so-so, and the touch panel was maybe 3 x 5 cm in size.
We had a "very fast" internet connection, an ISDN line that provided either 128 or 144 kBit per second. It was enough to browse the web. We could download and play music at home, one of the desktop machines had a SoundBlaster card. Downloading and playing live video was was de-facto impossible, at least not live. Roughly the same time we bought a DVD player and connected it to the TV, which meant we could watch movies much more conveniently; since we had a small child, many of the movies were things like Toy Story.
Over the next 25 years, I think the real change has been in a few dimensions. First, the computers have become much smaller. My current home server is the size of a shoe box, has about as many disk drives as I used to have in a whole rack in the basement (but much more space), and is somewhat faster (not many orders of magnitude though). It also does the function of firewall and router now. My current MacBook Air has a much larger screen than the 2001 HP laptop, a very good keyboard, and a fabulous trackpad. It is perfectly functional as a go-anywhere machine, and other than for gaming, heavy development, and tasks that require viewing many documents at once, I no longer need a stationary desktop. Although I do have that, with a 32" LCD screen, big keyboards, and sound output to a set of Yamaha monitor speakers via a dedicated DAC (no more SoundBlaster). I think the first laptop that was bought for home use was about 2004 or so (a Thinkpad T22), until then we only used desktops, or a laptop from work that came home in the evening.
The other huge change has been in internet speed. Today we have three adults at home, and we can all watch videos in good resolution at the same time, without any problem. It is rare that I buy music on CD (most can be streamed), and extremely rare that I buy a DVD (today called BlueRay) to watch a movie. Underlying this is that CPU/GPU speed now allows real-time movie watching at great resolution.
From a practical viewpoint, WiFi and Bluetooth have been complete game changers. The only ethernet wires that are still in use go from the server/firewall to the various access points. I'm still old-fashioned enough to use wired Sennheisers (with a DAC) for music; everyone else in the family is either using in-ears, or some bizarre looking gaming headphones that are bright green and flash LEDs in many colors.
Some people are interested in gaming, I'm not. I'm still at the intellectual level of the 550-point Adventure and Empire the war game of the century. I would love to set up my cp/m machine again, so I could get addicted to playing Ladder (a VT100 version of donkey kong, on a 4 MHz CPU with 64 kBytes or memory, over a 19200 baud serial line, the most fun you can have with a computer). Our son has three very large LCD panels in his room, and some gaming rig that cost him two whole paychecks (he's lucky, doesn't have to pay rent, and mom and dad prepare dinner).
It was a little earlier: in the mid 90s, compiling Linux (the kernel) took several hours. I used to run it overnight only, since during a compilation on the file server, the house infrastructure was de-facto unusable. Compiling gcc or libc was drama, because it would usually not finish by the next day. Even around 2001, compiling the big projects from work at home on the laptop could only be done during the dinner break (having 10 fast disks in parallel helped at lot). At work, I had an 8-CPU PA-RISC machine, and compiles took minutes (I mean 8 physical CPUs, each on a PC board, not one chip with 8 cores). A few years ago, when I worked at Google, for big compilations (everyone remembers "blaze build", right?), database queries in PiB databases, or data science analytics, I would commonly request the use of 8000 or 20,000 CPUs in parallel ... we had them, why not use them. And if a database query takes longer than going to the coffee machine, I'm wasting my valuable time.
I see the real progress not so much in the fact that (a) the personal machines that we (the Silicon Valley technocrats) are using have become much more comfortable, or (b) that we can now do things like live video meetings with 20 participants, or 4K movies on our lap, but instead in the democratization of computing. In the 90s, outside of a relatively small part of the US/European/Japanese population, few people had computers at home, or network access. I remember how difficult it was in the late 90s to get my mother-in-law in a small university town in the US connected via modem, so she could get e-mails and see baby pictures of her grandchild. In contrast, a few years ago I was in a poor rural area in the interior of Brazil (where my parents had moved), and everyone had at least one cell phone, my parents had multiple laptops and WiFi, I could WhatsApp video call with their maid instantaneously when something needed help. The maid's school-age children use tablets and mom's laptop for their homework. We have gone from a situation 25 years ago where perhaps 1% of the world population had instant access to the web for information and to the network for communication, to where de-facto everyone can participate. At work, we used to call that "NBU" or the "Next Billion Users": a product that is used by less than a billion people every month is not really a success.
