This equipment was expensive and bulky. Locally-built boards were not uncommon. Researchers had access to only tiny collections of images. Imaging is now becoming mainstream. Even laptops now have color display screens, large disks, and sufficient processing power to run computer vision algorithms.
Many homes have scanners.
Color cameras for the PC are now the size of 35mm cameras and rapidly dropping towards the price of other common peripherals. Stores sell a variety of shrink-wrap packages for graphics and image processing, as well as cookbooks for coding such algorithms. Now everyone can do imaging, cheaply and in bulk. Adapting to these changes requires re-thinking how we do research in computer vision, and how computer vision relates to the rest of computer science. Computer vision researchers must learn to work with the new, PC-based equipment.