I got my first "PC" not long after this in 1993. I had a Commodore 64 before that. Laptops did exist and had for a number of years already at this point but they were very expensive (of course PCs were pretty expensive too...my 486 DX2/66 was around $3000 in 1993) and there was generally a bigger performance gap between full blown PCs and laptops than there is today.
the C-64 was a funny little machine. I loved some of the games on it but my goodness did some of them take ages to load. You bought a $3000 computer in "93.? Good grief. :)
Well, I was going off to college and majoring in Computer Science. I had a summer job and spent pretty much all of the money I made on it. I thought it would come in useful and it did...though I probably could have gotten by with a little less. Certainly not my Commodore 64 though. Computers, at least PCs, were pretty expensive in 1993.
The Commodore 64 did load slow but cartridge based fastloaders helped a lot and later on newer games came with built-in fastloaders that basically reprogrammed how the drive worked so that it was much, much faster. The slowness wasn't so much a physical limitation as it was the result of a hacked fix for a design flaw that others eventually figured out better ways of doing.