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Over the years I’ve owned quite a few computers. An endless series of PC compatibles that mostly differed from each other in CPU speed or memory capacity. But before the PC era computers were a bit different in that they differed vastly from each other. The advent of the PC homogenized personal computing to a large extent, this is now due to the proliferation of mobile platforms and various tinkerer devices (Raspi, Arduino, etc) changing again but for the longest time it seemed as though x86 was what computing was all about. What computers helped shape the course your life?
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The course my life what? 
DEC: PDP, VAX
WOPR, Deep Thought, ...
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Computers I have gladly seen the back of...
zx81
atari portfolio
Acorn RiscPC (graphics mode options were worse than previous A3000)
HP Pavilion (Turion 64) - a blue screen nightmare
The ones that got away..
Commodore Amiga (a major regret)
Atari Falcon (costly)
Owned (but sold)
Atari 800 (30yrs & faultless operation)
Panasonic CF150 Portable (Green LCD)
Apple Performa 6200
HP 620LX (WinCE 2.11 - upgrade)
rev.A iMac (bondi blue)
+lots of PCs that I've built myself. (still do)
Still have
PDP11-23 (processor section only - no disk drives)
Atari ST/STe x 3 or 4 (as spares)
Apple G3 (last beige model) x2
Apple Quadra 610
Apple LC / Performa 450 (basically the same)
Apple Newton MP130 (spares with intention to repair someday)
Apple Newton MP2000 (MP2100 upgrade) - still in use
Atari XL (lots of spares) 600xl, still in use
Atari XE-GS/GM (x2 knackered spares)
HP Jornada 720 (x3 2 for spares)
Toshiba JournE Touch (Windows CE 6)
Raspberry Pi rev.B
3 or 4 more working PCs (XP64 x2, ubuntu studio 12.04) + lots of spare parts.
Jeezuz!! and I thought the pile was going down.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
modified 23-Feb-13 20:24pm.
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Quote: Apple Newton MP2000 (MP2100 upgrade) - still in use
Yes! I remember being so impressed with these devices when they were new.
My first employer had some fantastic early '90s SGI Iris and Indigo boxen that I loved playing with. Should have grabbed one when the company went under...
I'm still sort of half-seriously looking for a NeXT cube and an original Be Box. I built up a Tyan Tiger-based machine (dual Athlon XP) to run BeOS when they ported it to x86. Neat toy, but ultimately it went nowhere and the machine ended up running Win2k (quite well I might add). Great machine until the voltage controllers died and the smoke went out of it...
I get nostalgic for those old systems sometimes - then I'm reminded that a modern Mac does most of what they could, faster, with far better app and peripheral support. If I want to relive the old days I can just fire up a Terminal session.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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The NeXT boxes are fetching silly money on eBay these days, with or without packaging.
Funnily enough I also built a Tyan Tiger 230 system (2001/2 I think - fog rolls in..) That lasted about 3 years (Win2k) until the Athlon64 came out. Yay! I've been using those machines ever since. (I've replaced everything , incrementally)
I was lusting after those SGI boxes around the time that Nintendo 64 was released. Didn't they do development of N64 on SGI? or they provided the GPU for it. A real shame they went under.
The hand-writing recognition on the MP2000/2100 was way better than previous models, thanks to the StrongArm running at 160MHz or whatever it was. I left it with the main battery out for over 3 months and it had retained all the information when I went back to it. Amazing.
I really miss the simplicity of older systems, as they don't put barriers to the hardware.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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