Seriously!
I just ordered a new Mac Pro with Quad 2.8ghz Xeons. My first computer was a 12 mhz 286, so, 2.8 x 4 = 11,200 mhz ~ 12mhz x 1000. I will also have 2 GB of memory (although not for long) and my 286 had 1664K… A little more than 1000 times the RAM.
I just thought it was neat that those two numbers worked out that way.
N00b. My first computer was an Apple IIe (The first one I used, not owned.) My current eMac is getting old, but it has 1,000 times the clock speed and 10,000 times as much RAM.
I still have my Comodore 64 . My calculator is more powerful.
N00b. My first computer was an LGP-21, which I learned to program in high school. 4k of rotating memory (basically on a disk) and paper tape. I wrote an emulator for it in microcode that ran on a PDP-11 simulator, and even running the simulation was faster than the original machine.
You can find instruction timings here. Note non-optimal multiplies could take a tenth of a second, so modern machines are 100 million times faster (assuming 10 clocks per multiply, way too high.)
A couple of weeks ago I bought secondary hard drive - even not thinking about it much, just minor buy with intention to reduce need for changing CDs and DVDs so often. And then I realized, that that thing has half TERAbyte capacity. Whoa. My first personally owned computer was running with half MEGAbyte FLOPPY disk drive. And it was so much more than those C-64 with tapes I used previously.
Whoa. I feel like I just went to sleep and woken in one of these Sci-Fi stories I liked to read as a kid.
Piffle. My first computer was a Ticonderoga #2. Then I had a Vic 20. I had to upgrade to a C-64.
Off my lawn. Now.
My friend in highschool had a 1/2 megabyte memory module from an early computer. He kept it in his kitchen. It was bigger than his fridge.
So have I and my watch battery has more power than the C64
Aint technology wunnerful?
Heh, my first computer was a Vic 20 too. I have no idea what the clock speed was, but it had an amazing 5K of memory. 
It had no drive, but later on I bought a casette recorder that served to save stuff. We called it a stringy-floppy.
I suspect my current computer must be about a million times more powerful. But back in 1981, it was really amazing what it did.
I would guess that the new machine is considerably faster than just the difference in clock speed would indicate. The newer chip architecture is much more efficient, and algorithms have improved over the years.
Even so, I’d bet that Word launched faster on the older machine.
My Quad G5 blew a power supply the other day. If it wasn’t under recall, I’d probably have sprung for a new machine.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with a whopping 1K of RAM and clock speed was probably measured in kilohertz. Now, there’s a Dual-Core-Duo or whatever the heck it’s called on my desktop. Even though it’s “only” 2.0 GHz, it beats the pants off the 3.0 GHz Pentium that’s wasting space under my desk.
At work, I drive database servers that make my desktop PC look like a pocket calculator. A not-uncommon build for us is along the lines of: four eight-core CPUs, 64 GB of physical RAM, a 36 GB boot disk and a SAN box holding one or two terabytes of redundant disk. The boxes are upgradeable to eight eight-core CPUs and 128 GB of RAM.
Curse you! I hoped to be the first to mention the ZX-81.
My first computer was a ZX-81 as well. The computer I’m typing this on is a “late 2006” 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.16-GHz processor.
Memory? The ZX-81 has a stock memory of 1 kilobyte. This MacBook Pro has a stock memory of 1 gigabyte. (Both were expanded as quickly as possible.)
Expansion rate? 1024^2 = 1048576 times, or a million-fold increase in 25 years.
Processor speed? The ZX-81 has one processor with an 8-bit bus at 3.25 MHz. My MacBook Pro has a 2.16-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 2 64-bit processors.
So, that’s 8 bits x 3.2510e6 Hz, or 2610e6 bit-hertz*. The MacBook Pro has 64 bits * 2 processors * 2.1610e9 Hz, or 27610e9 bit-hertz. That’s a 10,000-fold increase in 25 years.
Consider that the main processor of the ZX81 also handled the video generation directly, while the MB Pro has separate video memory, and the difference is even greater.
And you can run a ZX-81 emulator in Java in a web page, and it’s probably faster than the original. 
[sub]*A unit I have just made up.[/sub]