I started my programming career in the late 1960s programming a 1.5 million dollar computer that took up half the floor in a building that took up a full city block in downtown Houston. This was years before computers had screens.
My first ereading was done on an HP 95LX, an 11 ounce computer with a mono screen and no light that ran on 2 AA batteries and could run MS-DOS software. It had a speaker that could only buzz a bit. It's screen was very low resolution but I could read on it. There were no ebooks to buy and wouldn't be for years to come.
These days I read on a Samsung Galaxy S5 (and on a Kindle) that has probably 10,000 times the speed and probably more than a million times the capacity of that first computer and has an amazing screen as well. Reading on it is a snap. So is listening to books or watching videos.
The first one cost 1.5 million. The 95LX cost about $600. This Galaxy S5 was $200 brand new from Pure Talk a couple of months ago.
Yes things have gotten better.
Barry