Not sure I remember where I bought them all, but it goes something like this:

8088 kit build computer circa 1979
Apple ][ 1981 from Apple
IBM-PC 1985 Local computer store
various flavors of PC's between 1987-2007
put together my self.
Last one using Q6600 on MSI mother board from NewEgg.


Ted

TI 99/4A (with a buncha options) In fact, I still have it :-)
Tandy C10 (tiny hand held color computer)
Tandy TRS80 Model III (TRSDOS)
Tandy TRS80 Model 4P (transportable) (TRSDOS)
Tandy 1000 (MSDOS)
Tandy 1000/256K color with expansion unit (MSDOS)
Leading Edge PC (8088 / 8mhz) (DOS)
Amiga 2000 (Video Toaster)
Amiga 4000 Tower (Video Toaster)
Shamrock PC (486)
IBM Intellistation Dual PII CPU's (Windows)
Deskstation DEC Alpha (Raptor) Speed Razor NLE (Windows)
Home built P4 ASUS mobo (XP Pro)
HP Pavilion AMD Phenom 8gig RAM, (Vista 64Bit)

I had a couple of Mac's thrown in as well. A Mac "Classic" and a Performa something or other. Can't remember exactly. Never had much use for either of them.

Actually, this also brings to mind that I had a couple of articles published in "80 Micro" and then a half dozen or so articles published in the magazine that replaced it, "PC Resource."

This should be an interesting thread...

Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) 1985-86 from Radio Shack

Macintosh SE 1988-89 from local PC store CompuRite

Mac Performa 400 series 1993 from Office Depot

From then on, mostly home builds:
AMD K5 1997
AMD Athlon 900 1999 (started editing with Pinnacle Studio on this...)
P4 2004
AMD Duron something
Dell laptop core-2 duo 2007
Two quad core boxes, Q6600 I think 2007

Everything from the Athlon 900 on is still running. Since 2004 parts have been almost all NewEgg or Fry's.

What, no one else had a Wang? Was I the only one?

lol.

Timex Sinclair (mail order from Sinclair)
TRS 80 Model III (8K RAM; Cassette Tape storage!) (Radio Shack Computer Center)
TRS 80 Model 4 (upgraded the Model 3) (Radio Shack Computer Center)
Compaq Sewing Machine Luggable (XT Compatible) (Sears Office Store)
Gateway 80286 (AT Compatible) (Mail Order from Gateway)
Blah, Blah, Blah
Homebuilt ASUS P5Q Mobo; Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550; (Newegg)

...Jerry

Here in Albuquerque in 1974, I was involved with the team that invented the M.I.T.S. Altair 8800 which is generally regarded as the first personal computer. So, my first computer was the first computer.

Osborne-1 (still have it)
Commodore Vic-20 - K-mart (Wish I still had it.)
Commodore C-64 - Sears
Commodore C128 - (Still have it)
Compaq 386/16 (Also still have it)
And then dozens of self-built PCs and laptops.

No, we all had Wangs.

:O)

But mine was a Mod. 9802(?) with a punch card reader that looked like a toaster, ca. 1972.

I was online via acoustic modems long before I got a first computer of my own, homebuilt with an RCA 1802 CMOS CPU and 2K RAM, feeding a Motorola OEM 12" CRT terminal. Data and program storage on cassette tapes recording modem tones at a blazing speed (for its day :O).

After that, too many to remember.

I also got a lot of joy out of developing software professionally, including a program for field use by archeologists excavating many tens of thousands of artifacts that all needed to be categorized and classified.

They were absolutely stunned to get a program that had auto-fill (remember, this was 30 years ago!), so that they just had to type as much as was unique for each artifact and the program would automatically fill out the rest, interactively with immediate and continuous display. It saved them about a year on the first project: 400 years worth of archeological goodies that were found when digging for a parking lot.

To this day, I get pissed off when database type programs don't have auto-fill...

Oh, if I want to go way back, I remember taking a course in college - "Analog Computer Applications in Chemical Engineering" The reason they call these new fangled gadgets "digital computers" is to differentiate them from the "analog computers".

Everyone got a power supply, a bunch of capacitors, resistors, transformers and you strung them together to simulate some chemical process and plotted the output via a volt meter.

Those were the days! All we had were slide rules and log tables. I've often said if we only had electronic calculators, I'd have increased my beer consumption 3 fold!!!

...Jerry

I bought my first computer in 1985. The choice was between a IBM "clone" and a Macintosh.

The question I asked was, "Hmmm... a monochrome display, 128K ram, no hard drive, and cost over $2000. So which one can I upgrade to a color monitor and add a hard drive and more RAM without buying a new computer? Okay, I'll take the IBM clone made by Columbia Data Products please."

I am pleased to say that it was a decision that I'm STILL glad I made. ;-)

Oh yeah, my second computer was from a small PC maker in Texas by the name of PC's Limited. A guy named Mike Dell started the company out of his college dorm room.

I only bought two or thee desktop computers after that. I've been putting together my own PC's from parts since about 1996.

P.S. I've used Macintosh's since then, for me there never was any reason to drop Wintel PC's in their favor. Apples stuff is good, just not "better" enough for me.

Quantex 1996
Quantex 1999
HP Desktop 2003
Home Built Dual core 2005
Home Built Quad core 2008 - still using this one!

I didn't buy/own them all, but they were bought/owned by either my parents or me. :)

C64
Tandy 1000 RT (i think, 16 colors, 3" floppy, 20gb HD, 4 channel sound card)
486 DX 33 custom build
|--->put a DX2 80 in there.
Pentium 200MMX (accidentally received, ordered a Pentium 160 but this showed up instead!) This lasted ~from 96 to ~03
Pentium 3 667 (with DDR, sweet sweet machine. Best intel ever produced imho, + the DDR = faster then many P4's I compared it to).
AMD XP 1800
AMD 64 3200
AMD X2 something or other (only had it 1 month, then it died in house fire)
AMD Phenon 9600.

Honestly, my fav's were the C64 & Tandy. They did so much that nothing else could do at the time (lots of colors, great sound, etc).

I couldn't begin to remember them all. I have had a few unique ones in my collection though that might not be known to many.

Apple //gs, the last Apple that was any threat to the PC world in the slightest (and yes i'm including Macs in that statement). People came from all around to "ooooh" and "ahhhhh" at the GUI running on the amazing 320x200 4 bit/16 color screen. Apparently at that time Microsoft was afraid that Windows would lose out to the gs' OS and rushed Windows 2 out the door to compete. I upgraded the thing to 1.25MB of RAM, which made an inordinately and bewilderingly large number of people ask me, "oh, you have a hard drive?" I never figured out why so many people asked that question. Even back then a 10MB hard drive would have been considered tiny.

Bondwell B100 laptop, 512KB ram, 20MB hard drive, DOS 6.22. I inherited it from work when the engineer who had been using it upgraded to a 10MHz 8086 desktop. He called it "The Mighty Bondwell". I've never heard of the brand before or since. I wrote an Eratosthenes Sieve program on it to calculate a list of prime numbers. In less than 6 months it had found the first 7000 of them. (I reran this program on a spare workstation in my office this spring and hit 70 billion in under a month.)

IBM RT (no, not the RS6000). It had a RISC processor, a whopping 2MB of RAM, and a 310MB drive. It ran AIX. Work used it as a database application server until we upgraded to a new system. My boss "gave" me the ol' RT ... i think in lieu of any performance bonuses that year. Oh boy. I kept it about a year, then left it on the sidewalk on trash day. Whether the garbage man took it or someone else made off with it, i have no idea.

RadioShack pocket computer, the original model. It had a 4 bit processor (yes, you read that right, not even 8 bits), 8K of memory, and a 21 character by 1 line LCD display. It's most redeeming feature was that it would run for a couple months on 3 watch batteries. It was a hand-me-down from my dad and i may even still have it in a drawer somewhere. I think he even bought a printer for it which printed plain text on 2" wide thermal transfer rolls, though i have no idea where that ended up.

Wanna know something that's really really sad and yet kinda funny too? That RadioShack pocket computer was way more powerful than the computers that got the Apollo missions to the moon!

TI 99/4A (Christmas present)
Atari 520ST (Christmas present)
Generic PC (Somewhere in Germany)
Generic PC (Aberdeen)
Generic PC (Aberdeen)
Toshiba Satellite (PX)
Generic PC (Aberdeen)
Dell Studio (direct from Dell)

Sinclair ZX80 (not brilliant for video editing)
Tandy TRS80
Commodore 64
Amiga 500
Atari 1040STe (Still the most dependable I've had)
Various PCs from P166 onwards ...

Man make me think way back, it all started when I went to college CAD major my first year I got a home brew 286 / 16MHZ, then the college hired me to teach CAD for them at the new Prison in Oregon the states largest. Anyway the love grew from there, the list is something like this;
Small store 286 1meg ram 20 meg HD
Bigger store 386 4 meg ram 40 meg HD
Small Store 486 4 meg ram 40 meg HD
Micron pentium 66 8 meg ram 80 meg HD
Then tried my hand at building my own; and have been there ever since.
AMD Duron 1100
AMD XP 2200+ my first mulit GIG HD
AMD XP 2800+ Plus my first DVD burner 160 GIG HD
My latest build it a
Intel Q6600 Quad core in a 4U rack mount server case, 4 GIG ram 3 HD's = to 2.75 TERABYTES active storage + 1.5 T in mounted reserve. 2 ATI radeon videocards and 3 monitors.

I gave up the cad world when my job was eliminated and my wife and I started a Video business. We still use the AMDs the 2200+ is in my other rack case. Lots of fun and now i have my sights on a new Core I7 .
Oh and that old AMD duron is also still in use by one of my kids..

Thanks for bringing all the fun memories back of PC's past.
I think I missed a couple but overall I am still a GEEK and proud of it.

Paul B

OH almost for got 1 gateway laptop and 1 HP laptop Whew that is all folks...

I had a Wang terminal on a Imsai-8800 running CPM-100
That thing was the size of a small wheelbarrow.

Peter!


Sinclair ZX80 (not brilliant for video editing)


. . . hysterical!!! - Funniest line I've read here for months . . .

Grazie

. . still chucklin' . .

Interesting to see so many Sinclair and Commodore users on this group!

#1 - 1984/85 Sinclair Spectrum 16K later hacked to 80KB, by adding two paged 32KB chunks, can't remember how much it cost maybe US$150-$200.

#2 - 1987/88 Commodore Amiga 2000 (mail order from a company in King of Prussia, PA...not sure if it was commodore itself), ~US$2000.

## Sun & SGI workstations at the university for a long time!

#3 - 1997/98 Commodore Amiga 4000, traded for my trusty old A2000!

#4 - 2000 SGI Indy - given to me free, & I purchased a spare machine for parts for $25! Machines still work, but don't use them.

## Used Macs and PCs at work

#5 - 2001(?) DELL PC Pentium4 - mail order DELL, ~US$1000 or less. First time owning a PC...15 years after first using a computer! Still works, but given to someone else.

#6 - 2004/2005 DELL PC, P4 HyperThreaded, mail order from DELL, ~US$600, still in use.

#7 - 2008 HP PC, Core2Quad 9450, mail order from HP US600, still in use.

#8 - 2009 Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - yes, it's a phone, but it's capable of doing more than my Spectrum and several things that I use my latest PC for! And I can write programs for it...

Honestly, none of the PC hardware has been as interesting as the Spectrum, Amiga or the Sun & SGI boxes!

Started with Gateway in 1995. Numerous upgrades and thousands of dollars since then. (I'm afraid to add up the dollars)
JJK

Thanks Grazie - good to know that appreciators of the absurd are still around ...

A TRS 80 (4k)
First job with a computer, I fitted an Apple lle in a saw mill to sort logs for size and which end came first on a conveyor. Ran Apple basic and gave a print out of stats. This was 1985 and it was still running when the mill closed in 2007. Only had about 4 breakdowns in that time which was good as the mill was a five hour drive away.
Sinclair Spectrum with 48k of memory, a fantastic unit for the time
First real computer a second hand CPM with 2 8inchdrives, one disc for op system the other with Spelbinder word proc.
Then a Wang of some sort from an offoice throw out which I stripped down and fitted an XT MB, 10 meg drive. Later upgraded to 286 then 486, was a realy weird looking thing.
Since then started to build proper looking computers till now run 4 core state of the art (well 2008 art)
Trouble is I,ve still got all those units plus many more 'trade ins' and gifts from kind??? friends taking up valuable workshop space but cant bring myself to through 'em out

Started off with a Vic 20 and a cassette deck for program uploads & storage.
Moved up to a Commodore 64 (my wife used it throughout college - anyone remember Paperclip??) and then an Amiga2000/Toaster bundle at the office (early 90's).
Fantastic setup for doing video back in its heyday!!
Real shame that Commodore blew it as they ruled the desktop video market back then :-(
Finally got into the PC market with a Pentium 200, then an AMD something or other and currently a QX6700 quad core.
Spent about the same number of $ (about $3K each time) on all 3 PC systems, each about 5 years apart.

Mike