Thanks for sharing those details, coaldigger! IIRC the first computer I actually had contact with was only one floor of an office building. The company I worked for paid for usage at about $20,000 per month. The consultant from Arthur Anderson had to rewrite our main application because it kept running out of memory. That computer had about 96k memory available for our application, I think. IIRC, each batch run was started with a stack of cards containing the program, and a stack containing the data.

My university had 2 years of compulsory ROTC and at the end of your sophomore year you could elect to go into advanced ROTC which led to a commission upon graduation. As a recruiting tool they took some candidates on a base visitation. I went to a base in Newberg, NY where they had a SAGE unit charged with guarding the NE coast from attack by Russian bombers or ICBM's. The monitoring and tracking was done by a stare of the art computer system which was housed in a 14 story building. Most of the space was used for air conditioning because the computer used vacuum tubes. The entire system had far less capacity than the pi.

I should get this for my kid. I need to learn more about it.

Exactly right. 384k advertised, 360k usable. It was the 10Mb hard drive that was truly immense. For some time after purchase, as I boarded planes to fly to consulting engagements, passengers asked me about my "sewing machine." No need for a gym with a 30 lb computer in one hand, a 30 lb leather bag of client files in the other and a 40 lb clothes bag over my shoulder. 100 pounds of carry on bags and never an audible complaint from passengers, stewardesses, or pilots. And no jack booted thugs frisking little girls and old ladies.

"The r-pi is 212 times faster, "
People used to say, this machine just screams. [bad joke]Now you can say it boils. [/bad joke]
Anyway, my first drive on my XT clone held in the 360k usable space after formatting, unless you used utilities that squeezed a little extra. Double-Sided Double-Density. Before that I had an audio tape storage, but that I never thought of that as real storage.

Note: My Compaq transportable was 30 years old last spring. That was my first computer (excluding calculators.) It cost about $3000. The r-pi is 212 times faster, has 700 times the memory, and video output is about 16 times the resolution, and it's color, not green on black!
You do have to provide disk storage for the r-pi, so the Compaq's 384k floppy drive was AWESOME! I was advised that I would never need more than the 10Mb hard drive that was optional.
The Compaq was about 30 lb and, no, it did not run on batteries. ha-ha