My uncle has been working with computers for over 40 years now. He did quite a bit in computer development back in the day, working with Honeywell. His work was classified so he was not able to discuss the details of his job with anyone other than he worked with computers. Even if he did I'm pretty sure that at that time no one would understand what he was talking about anyways. My aunt didn't even know what he did. He used to tell us that he did crossword puzzles all day.
I remember him telling us about one of the first computers that he had worked on developing, it was massive and took up an entire room that had to be air conditioned because of the amount of heat it generated. The computer itself was basically a glorified calculator/typewriter, it really couldn't do very much.
I remember being at his house as a kid and my cousin and I would hook the phone up to one of these types of modems
and log-in to some computer that was at my uncles work that just had games on it. The funny thing is that the games were all text based and the monitor that we were using was green text on black screen...you really needed to have a good imagination when playing those games.
How computers have advanced in a relativity short period of time is pretty crazy if you think about it.