> Every once in a while I really consider how much, say, my parents and grandparents paid for computer processing power (grandfather's C64 at ~ $500, our first PC running a 386 at $1100) and compare it to the torrent of amount of memory, processing speed, etc. that's shooting out of the Earth now.

It's such a simple way of looking at it but I've always found this amazing:

There was as much progress between 1965 and 2012 as between 2012 and now.