HHmm,
When I did my final year project at Uni (1983) on fault levels in the National Grid, my programming was done on an HP machine with an cassette tape drive.
in the late 80s, I was programming GEM80 PLCs with both the black "portable" terminal and the less portable Yellow Peril. I usually had to put these in the car to take them between sites.
In my previous employ, we thought it was great getting a £5000 HP Vectra 386 "state of the art" around 1990.
I also found out recently that our last PLC5 Co-processor card had a spare in our stores that was actually no use to us, as the original had been "upgraded" by replacing the motorola chips with some that had a greater memory (probable still in kb though).
Yes, I have a recently purchased 2TB portable hard drive that struggles to load up and be read by some of the PCs in here, whereas the older USB sticks work very well.