My first home computer was an Apple II+. The "plus" was because it ran Applesoft instead of Integer Basic, which meant that it could do floating point math (like a calculator) and that it had commands for drawing "high resolution graphics". The hires graphics were 280 x 192 pixels, which could be any of six different colors, although not all pixels could be all colors.
The Apple's CPU was an 8 bit 6502 from Motorola, which ran at 1MHz. Most instructions took two or three cycles to complete, so it probably ran about 300,000 instructions per second. It originally came with a whopping 16KB of memory, which was sufficient to run many programs. It used a cassette recorder (not included) to store and retrieve data. Later I augmented the computer with a floppy disk drive (capacity: 140KB per 5 inch floppy) and another 32KB of memory.
My current home computer is an IBM-compatible running Windows 98 Second Edition. It sports 256MB of memory, a 1GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird CPU, and 64MB of graphics memory, capable of displaying one of 16,777,216 colors for every pixel in a 2,048 x 1,536 grid. The hard drive can hold 27GB of data. Many of the CPU instructions can run simultaneously in one clock cycle. I would hazard a guess that it averages about 500 million instructions per second.
I bought my Apple II+ in 1979 for about $1300 that I had made working after school jobs. It was a bit more expensive than the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80, but I really wanted access to the high resolution graphics, so it seemed worth it. I learned a lot with that old computer: BASIC, assembly language, structured programming, ray traced graphics, even some real-time programming to push the one-bit sound (think "click click click") to its limits.
I bought my current computer in 2000 for roughly $1400. It has approximately 16,000 times the memory, 200,000 times the storage, 1400 times the graphics resolution, at least 1000 times the computing power on integer math and probably far more on floating point arithmetic than the Apple. I haven't really learned all that much from this computer. Most of my time with it is spent paying bills or playing 3D games with full stereo sound (which it does very well). I even have an Apple emulator program that runs many times faster than the original Apple ever could.
I recently dug up some mid to late '80s source code that ran on the IBM AT. If I have time, I am going to try to get it to run on my current setup just to see how fast it would be. I think that the fastest machine I ever ran this code on was a 33MHz 486, and it needed about two minutes to compute the position of all of the wires on a small circuit board. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes on today's hardware. Well, interesting to me, at least.
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