My first hard drive was a Dataframe 20. 20meg was the biggest hard drive you could get for a personal computer at the time, and it was not physically THAT big. Seem to remember paying around $600 for it used. They were $1099 new.
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Connected to my 512 Mac with a 50 pin SCSI. So much better than running programs off 400K single sided 3.5" disks. Before getting the external hard drive I was thrilled to have an external 400K 3.5 drive so I didn't have to switch disks all the time, one for the program, on for files.
I took a basic programming class and used my brother's Apple II. It had a whole 16K of memory and files were loaded and saved on a cassette tape using an audio cassette recorder.
After college I bought my own computer, an Apple Iic. It had a built in 5.25in floppy drive and 300 baud modem but had to be connected to an external monitor. Either a TV or a 9 inch monochrome. I called it a typewriter that remembers. I was dragging it back and forth to work to manually code text for typesetting and send the files to the typesetter using the modem.