I had (and still have) a Teddy Ruxpin.

Yeah I remember getting all excited the day we had a TV with a RCA/AV jack and thought, damn I'm going all kinds of hi-def now!

I had to fast forward or rewind a cassette tape to a specific time to play a game in the computer.

Let's listen to this radio station play an unholy noise for about 30 minutes, record it in a cassette tape, and play the game recorded in those BAUD BOIS

You had to empty the bit bucket once in a while.

My first one was wood grained

You used to have to print out a document and then scan it into another machine that would use landlines to send it to another printer so someone, somewhere else, could have the document.

C:\park.exe

Blowing the cartridge may or may not work.

I had a couple of magazine CDs that I got from a trial subscription.

https://archive.org/details/launchcdmagazine

AOL zines were pretty neat.

https://medium.com/s/requiem-for-an-internet/how-aols-tween-zine-scene-pioneered-the-digital-self-9f2e261a6d2a

Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)

We had no power in our home.