I have always built my own for myself and all my relatives and a few friends.

First was a 386
five 486s
a Pentium
a Pentium II
seven Pentium IIIs

Current editing computer is a PIII 1000
Current everything else computer is also a PIII 1000

John

1. Radio Shack TRS-80. We loaded software onto it with a cassette tape recorder.
2. IBM XT
3. IBM AT
4. Systemax Celeron 400mhz (My first video editor. It had a 40GB RAID. I thought I'd never need more disk space.)
5. Homebuilt Athlon 800
6. Homebuilt Athlon XP 1800
7. Gateway Celeron 900 laptop
8. Homebuilt Athlon XP 2700 (my current desktop editor... may upgrade this year)
9. Sony VAIO PCG-GRT250P 2.8 Ghz laptop (my current road editor)
10. Dell Inspiron 1150 2.0Ghz Celeron laptop (shared office / e-mail stuff)

1) Apple IIc
2) Amiga 500
3) Dell 486
4) HP Pentium 1 (still using the case)
5) Homebrew dual Celeron (yes, I know it's not supposed to have been possible)
6) Homebrew AMD
7) Dell Pentium 4

My first computer was a Chinese built abacas. OK, I' m old.

What about the BBC Model 'B'

I thought everybody had one of those!

The HP 9830 was a better guess and it really was a personal computer, but still not the first by far.

None of the earlier "personal computers" had a keyboard or display. I'll stick with my statement that the 9830 was the first machine that had all the elements necessary to be called a personal computer. When I first used an Apple II or the IBM PC, they felt just like using the old 9830 (and later the 9820 and 9825).

Gateway P90, 1995, $3800.00. Still using the cabinet, floppy, tape backup, fans, power supply, Epson stylus color printer, HP-3C scanner.Everything else gone.

JJK

Apple II
Apple III
Apple Lisa
Apple Mac 128
Some time goes by...
HP Omnibook 600CT laptop
Compaq 5070 (AMD K6-2 350)
w/ AMD K6-2 550
Homebuilt AMD Duron 750
w/ Duron 900
w/ AMD T'bird 1200
w/ AMD XP2100

That's where I am today. My Homebuilt PC has gone through 3 motherboards, 3 power supplies, 4 DVD burners, 3 CD burners, 2 sets of memory. I've used the same XPpro software image on every PC starting with the Duron 750; even with different motherboards it's very easy to clone your entire configuration (OS + apps) without having to laboriously reinstall everything, if you follow Microsoft's advice.

Waiting in the wings is an ASUS A8V motherboard. I'll be buying an AMD X2 CPU one of these days, and then THAT combo will go in the PC case.

TRS-100 laptop in 1988. I was cool on the airplane!

Others
386 with 640K of RAM
Several 486's
Pentium 166mhz

All of the above except the TRS-100 are stacked up in the garage. Looking to build a Linux Beowolf cluster in all my spare time.

Now :
Dual PIII 1000mhz
PIII 933mhz
Pentium 3.2 HT - editing machine
IBM T-41 laptop

My first computer had:

1.0 GHz processor Pentium 3
256 MB ram
Soyo Mainboard (withstereo sound and many PCI slots and 2 usb ports)
CD burner 8X Samsung (in nowdays it's up to 32X)
Hard Disk 40GB Quantum Fireball
Monitor Samsung 15"
Tarjet Video NVidia 32 MB (hasn't FX yet in that days)

And yet so, Vegas Video 3.0 runed fine in that dates, my first computer was purchased in August 2001.

Now in 2006 , my sencond generation computer is more powerfull then the first (look my profile) only I have yet the keyboard, the hard disk and the flopy from the first computer.

I hope to get a computer more powerfull in 3 or 5 year in the future, why??? because I work con audio, video and dvd.

Juan

I guess I left out my "RCA Spectra 70" 4-bit(!) mainframe computer that filled up a whole room, with a double floor to make room for cables underneath to the refrigerator-size 7 MB disk drive....

It was a corporate donation to an early Computer Society I co-founded.

I did stay away from the early vacuum tube computer at my university, which came with a most important tool: a tube tester.

Between the number of tubes and the MTBF of each tube, it was important to make sure that each computation was finished in 15 minutes or less...

Oh, the days...

Not exactly Double Dual-core Opterons...

:O)

Commodore VIC20 (loaded programs with tape)
Commodore 64 Luggable (loved this machine)
8086 IBM
8088 IBM
Gateway 386SX16
Countless others from there

Sab

commodore 64 with tape drive and that dodgy kayboard overlay which let u use the thing as a musical keyboard. Then i got a Disc drive and a "freeze machine" and my pirating days begun.. this was about 1985-6 from memory... I remember ye old multiload games.. i HATED multiload games coz half teh time ud be near the ned of a game and when loading the final part, it would fail...
I got into music with this machine and the SID chip is amazing for what it is.. yes it SOUNDS like a C64, but have a listen to half teh dance music out there.. ;)
Theyve even released an actual synth using said engine..

umm.. second was an Amiga500 with 1mb upgrade.. this thing rocked.. I loved the way it could handle polygons.. i used to have this game fighter bomber.. no shit the view would start from a satelite in space and zoom al the way in to the cockpit.. brilliant stuff..
From there it was a 386 p33 with god knows how much ram... i remember runnign win3.1 on it and i remember how unstable it was.. for my muic though, i found a cheap arsed atariST and ran afew tracker programs from that.. damn this thing rocked..

from there it was a Sega Megadrive.. SNES, and then i moved to PS1... from there all my music evovled to HW synths and samplers, so computers were only used to make the recordings, nto to sequence..
from there i got back into computers and realy got nto midi and Logic pro audio (before apple bought it out) and so i bout a p2, 350mhz with 64mb ram.. a diamond viper gfx card (16mb and the first soundblaster sound card to come to australia. This came wiht the daughterboard which housed all teh digital and midi connections..
it didnt take long before iu nede to upgrade the ram, so at 192mb ram, this thing kicked.. 6gb HDD and a SCSI burner coz i "wont need a bigger HDD" LOL
yeah right..
either way.. the unit lasted abotu 3 and half years and when i got into post production audio (for video production) it worked a treat.
Ran Vegas (the ORIGINAL) vegas, and soundforge XP wthut a problem. Cubase was making its mark in the PC realm and Logic was slowly dying out. Many more "all in one" applications were being released and Cakewalk express was really making headway with Soundfonts and external device controls. It was really nifty but boggy IMO..
SO i stuck with my HW sequencers and used the PC the interface to all the units remotely. worked a treat and with the Soundblaster live, i had an incredibly flexible sampler at my fingertips.. back then a sampler wiht this much grunt didnt exost.. until Yamaha released the A3000... i bought the MkII which absolutely KICKED.. no shit this unit was a PC in a box.. HDD, ram the whole shabang.. i used to gig with an RM1x and an A3000mkII and it sounded like i had a whole damn studio under teh decks.. astounding stuff for its time..
Anyways back to the PC.. this thing stunned me.. the lowly spec of this PC STILL had the capacity to run Vegas 3 and i even edited my own wedding on this.. mind u it was edited in 15minute increments as HDD space was virtually non existant..

Got into post production audio from there..
Until i started reshooting alot of the work which came out way...
so then i built the machine im on now.. about 3 yrs ago actually..
120gb were 600bux, ram was 600bux, cpus were relatively cheap but i built a hardassed machine.. p4, 2.4mhz (HT wasnt out then) 80gb system drive, 120gb video drive, 1gb ram <apparently it was overkill lol yeah right> SBLive Audigy, and a radeon 9000pro. It was specificlaly designed to run vegas 4 and it did it wonderfully.
Over teh years it was upgraded with additional drives, ram and GFX cards.. until we moved.. the motherboard CPU bridge died, so it neded a whole rework..
now its a P4, 3.0gh extreme with 2mb cache, HT with 2gb ram, 800mhz fsb and 2TB storage exc system drive. Stll runnin radeon 9200 now though and for waht i use it fr, it works a treat. HDV performs OK if i use cineform and everythgn else jsut works..

My motto is that if it aint broke, done fix it...

either way, my next purchase is a dual dual core, 4gb ram, 2tb raided monstrosity, stupidly hardcore gfx card (most likely SLI) and one of those new SB soundcards..

Thing is, im considering jumping ship to stills so i may not even need all that hardware.. time will tell. .

Well, first there was,,,

1) Homebuilt RCA 1802 COSMAC Elf, 256 BYTES of memory -- 1976

followed by...

2) MOS Technology Kim-1 SBC, 6502 processor, 1K memory, Teletype tape reader/punch - 1978
3) Sinclair ZX-81, 16k ram, 300 baud modem - 1981
4) Several Timex/Sinclair 1000s (American version of ZX-81 - got 'em cheap)
5) Timex/Sinclair 2068 w/ZX Spectrum rom switch - about 1983?
6) Apple II+ w/PCPI Z80 CP/M card & $700 20mb hard disk - 1985
7) Tandy TRS-80, CP/M, 64k, 8" floppy drives (freebie), mid-80s
8) Morrow MD-3 (CP/M) - cheap, mid-80s
9) Kaypro 4-84 (CP/M) - $100, mid-80s
10) Comtrade 486-66, 8mb memory, 200mb hard drive - $2500+ - 1992
11) ABS 700mHz Athlon - 2000
12) HP 6642f, provided by Ford Motor Company, 2000
13) warranty repair of #11 w/850mHz Athlon, new mobo, HD & CD Burner -- 2001
14) CPU upgrade of #11 to 1.3gHz Duron -- fall 2003, Pinnacle Studio nightmare begins
15) homebuilt Athlon XP 2600+, for video editing, December 2003, Studio 9 ran ok

--- bought Vegas 5, April 2004 -- smooth sailing ever since!

16) HP Omnibook XE-3 laptop (freebie), 2005

Overdue for a new computer!

Commodore VIC-20 for me. Then, it was a short hop to the C-64.

Yes . . . I could gush about the C-64 for hours. Truly the greatest machine of its class and generation.

But it looks like I was beaten to that . . .

Commodore 64 ,was great could catch a movie while loading my fav game, a drag racing game,, I'm talkin loading after each 10 sec race!!

ahh ye ol c64..

who remembers classics such as last ninja, renegade, zamzara, armalyte, IK+ (with all the cheats and dropping pants hack) god i could go on......

ahh ye ol c64..

Forget the games. Paperclip (great word processing program) helped get my wife through 3 years of college :-)

Mike

In the Past:
Apple IIgs
Macintosh SE
DIT Computer (not sure of CPU used in those things)
Home built (AMD XP 1700)

Currently:
2 Home built (1 Liquid Cooled AMD XP 3200; 1 AMD 1700); 1 Presario Lap Top

A SWTP 6800 with whopping 64K memory and Percom floppy.
(this was no appliance computer you had to solder each part)

After that kinda blurr. Did own an IBM PC/AT and paid what you
pay for a HD camera now. Had 10M hard drive. (meg not geg)

Now you guys know why I have grey hair. These are antiques.

My first computer was an Atari 800 computer I used while in high school.

I used that computer while studying engineering in college. I remember doing my homework on that computer and it would take all night to run the programs that would run in a few seconds on the VAX at Rutgers College of Engineering. Runge Kutta differential equation solvers, Prandle's lifting line theory, etc.. But hey, I didn't have to go into the basement in the computer lab and wait for a station.

That old Atari 800 is still in my parents basement.

- Mark