1982 to today…
ZX81 – sold it via newspaper ad
Vic20 – sold it via newspaper ad
BBC Micro – sold it via newspaper ad
Sinclair Spectrum - gave it back to my employer
Amstrad 664 – traded it for a desk
C64 – gave it back to my employer
Atari ST – gave it back to my employer
Home-built 286 PC – got turned into…
Home-built 386 PC – at home in England (used this while at Reading)
MS-owned… 2nd hand Toshiba Satellite Pro 1 – “recycled”
MS-owned… Toshiba Satellite Pro 2 – “recycled”
Home – Compaq desktop - in the garage
MS-owned… Dell Laptop #1 – destroyed
MS-owned… Dell Laptop # 2 – destroyed
Home – HP desktop - in use
MS-owned… Toshiba Tablet – ready to be retired
MS-owned… 2nd hand Toshiba Laptop – ready to be retired
IBM Lenovo T60P – current machine

Have had a few 2nd hand, desktop, test and loaner machines during this time not included in list.

Since early 80s

Radio Shack TRS80 - sold in garage sale
IBM PS/1 - sold to sucker graduate student
Toshiba laptop - sitting unused on a closet top shelf
Dell Dimension 4100 - donated to church-based refurb program
Apple Mini - current home machine

Work machines - Apple MacBooks, new version in 02, 05, 08, no idea what they do with the old ones.

Oh no, people are going to think that I’m some sort of eco-monster because of the Apple purchasing habits I mention in the thread that you linked to starting this talk :(

Well, I may be an eco-monster, although not because of this. I also don’t have a car, and have been commuting with public transportation to and from work or school everyday since 2002 (with the exception of my year in Reading… here, I walk to school).

As for my four laptops and two iPods since 1999…

1. When my first laptop died I sold it to a repair shop (who wanted to take it apart) for $100. So I hope that many of the parts got reused and not thrown straight away.

2. When so many parts of my second laptop died, I gave it to my mother, who had much of it repaired at her own costs, and now she uses it as a stationary machine.

3. My third laptop still hasn’t died! It lives in Berlin, being periodically used.

4. I’m still using my fourth laptop every day ;-)

As for my first iPod, well, that probably is in a landfill somewhere. My second iPod is safe and sound, right next to me.

From 1995–1999 I had a desktop Performa. This never got thrown away. It lives inside a closet still at my parents’ house.

Going back to Jnr High...

C=64 (still runs!)
PowerMac 7200 (Bought in college. Still Runs!)
PowerMac G4 Tower (Still Runs!)
Handful of Compaq Servers (long since recycled)
TiBook (screen died, donated to brother)
MacBook (for me, main computer)
MacBook (for wife, her computer)
MacMini (for the kids)
Treo/Palm Handheld (laying around somewhere unused)
Sony Handheld (inherited, laying around somewhere unused)
10gb iPod rev. 1 (laying around somewhere)
160gb iPod classic (my main iPod)
iPod Mini (wife’s)
HP Desktop something-or-other (my main windows machine)
Playstation (roomate took it)
Playstation II (sat mostly unused, donated to sis-in-law)
Nintendo Wii (fun!)

Out of all the above, I think only the iPod and Wii are the computers I truly enjoy using anymore.

Love lists :-) From 1990 till now (and only Apple stuff) ...

Mac LC (pizzabox) with 12” Apple crt (sold to my brother in law)
Centris 610 with 14” Apple ctr (sold to can’t remember who)
iMac Bondi Blue (sold to a colleague)
iMac DV Graphite (sold to another colleague)
eMac (now my wife’s computer for e-mail and surfing)
MacBook Pro (in use) with (recent:just bought it today :-) an Apple 23” Cinema HD Display
iPod 3rd gen (still in use)
iPod Shuffle (in use by my youngest son)
iPod Nano (in use by my wife)
iPod Nano alu (in use by my oldest son)
iPhone G3 (recent)

From 1990, PC only, all assembled, I learned this from my uncle and my father.

1. Assembled AT8088 5 1/4 diskettes only. Owned by my father but intensively gamed by me.
2. Assembled 286 with 2 mb of RAM. Also owned by my father, made first homeworks on it.
3. Assembled 386 with 8mb of RAM. Father owned, first contact with color screen.
4. Assembled 486 with 32mb of RAM. Father owned, first contact with corel draw and sound.
5. Pentium II with 128mb of RAM. Bought for graphic design school.
6. Pentium IV with 256mb of RAM. Second school computer.
7. Celeron 2.66 ghz 2gb of RAM. Bought a couple of years ago for work.

Number 1 to 5 are catching dust on boxes. 6 is being used by my parents and every time I visit them I have to clean and fix the software. 7 is the one I’m typing on and will remain active at least for a year and a half.

Héctor

I just ran into this thing... Cool.

1977: Commodore PET 2001-8
Purchased in Palo Alto for $800. Neighbors had no idea what it was. We weren’t too sure either. Internal cassette drive (speed estimated at 50 bytes/second). Traded in to CBM dealer in Beirut for purchase of next item. Still kicking self for that.

1980: Commodore PET 4016
External cassette drive. Donated to my high school upon purchase of next item. They never touched it. So my brother and I basically broke into their storage room one evening and did an extraction. Still in my parents’ basement in Beirut.

1982: Commodore 64
What an amazing machine that was. Next to the PET in the basement. Has the external floppy drive (which cost more than the computer), and I was in awe of its blazing speed and massive 170Kb capacity.

1987: Amiga 500
1.5Mb Ram. No hard disk. Ran Fontographer 3.1 under Mac emulation (used a virtual RAM-Drive partition to fake a hard disk). Added a weird daughterboard to support an over-clocked FPU (used to do ray-traced animation). Donated to a very small Armenian TV show in LA for videotitling upon purchase of next item.

1992: Amiga 3000
Hard disk! Killer machine. Still in garage.

199?: Commodore Plus-4
Purchased at garage sale. Sold at garage sale.

1995: Self-built PC box (386)
Used for testing fonts. Still in garage.

1996: Apple IIcx
Picked up on the way to being dumped. Used for testing fonts. Trashed upon acquisition of next item.

1998: Apple Quadra
Picked up on the way to being dumped. Used for testing fonts. Trashed.

2000: Dell laptop - Latitude 14”
Purchased used. The first non-Commodore I ever liked. My gray warrior. Sold via eBay upon purchase of next item.

2003: Compaq laptop - 15”
Crappy machine. CPU melted when fan got blocked. Data all OK!

2006: Dell laptop - Inspiron 17”
Pretty ugly, but solid worker. Current main machine.

2009: HP 2140 mini (HD screen)
Great little machine. Not used enough.

hhp

1984: Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. Really no more than a huge desktop calculator with a tape drive. What a piece of junk. Its built-in BASIC sucked. Scrapped.

1985: Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48+ (not the rubbery keyboard jobby, but a sleek black one with proper keys!). Fairly slow, until I learned to program in raw Z80 machine code. Bliss! Sold to a friend on next purchase.

1986: Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128. Built-in tape drive, more memory, nice advanced sound chip (a Yamaha, if I’m correct). For the rest pretty same as above. Sold on next purchase.

1988: Brand new Atari ST 520. Yes, the Amiga was better graphically, but this was a lot cheaper. Learned 68000 assembler. Wrote an almost-complete Postscript emulator. Checked out Mac programs. Played games. Lent it to a friend (and never got it back) after next purchase.

1989/1990: (ish) Second hand Acorn Archimedes A3000. Double disk drive, but still no hard drive. Learned ARM assembler. Incredibly powerful machine — learned to program for PCs through its emulator. Still have it, but no monitor to hook it up to ...

1991: Self-built 486 PC. Learned 8086 assembler and C. Bought a virtual reality helmet and learned to write programs for it. A new dimension to graphics! Traded in for next purchase.

..2009: Various PCs, all Frankenstein-wise containing salvaged parts from previous PCs. Ransacked items travelled down the family to dad, brothers, sisters, until (presumably) old beyond measure and scrapped. Learned C++ and wrote all kinds of programs for Windows, with various success.

2009: Dawn of a new age: while writing, I’m still oogling this shiny new 21.5” iMac. Learning XCode as we speak. Posting this because my head hurts of going again through a major programming paradigm change.

Price-wise I don’t appear to have learned something; always shelling out near-top prices for machines that are advertised to be very nearly “top of the bill” for no more than 6 months.
Memory-wise I amuse my younger colleagues with stories of 48K, filled to the point of overflowing, where this machine has about 80,000 times that much.
Performance-wise: here I am, staring at a 1920 x 1080 32-bit color screen and trying to decide how this is more fun than 256x192, black-and-white ...

1980: Sinclair ZX80 (sold)

1981: Atari 400

1983: Atari 800

1984: Atari 800XL
1984: Mac 128k (sold). Through various upgrades ended up as the world’s most expensive Mac Plus (~$4500)

1987: Mac Plus (sold)

1989: Mac II (sold)

1990: Mac IIcx (sold)

1992: PowerBook 140 (sold)
1992: PowerBook 160 (sold)

1993: Quadra 840av (sold)

1994: PowerBook Duo 230 (sold)
1994: PowerMac 7100 (sold)

1996: PowerMac 7600 (sold)

1998: PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet)

1999: PowerMac G3 (Blue & White)

2000: PowerMac G4 Cube

2003: PowerBook G4 (Titanium) (sold)

2004: PowerMac G5 (Dual 1.8Ghz)
2004: HP Pavilion (sold)

2006: MacBook Pro 15” (sold)

2007: Mac Pro (2x 2.66 Dual Core Xeon)

2008: MacBook Pro 15”

2009: MacBook Pro 17” (unibody) My current main computer.

I guess I’m kind of a Mac guy. I’ve only listed computers that were my primary or, in a few cases, secondary computer. Unless noted as sold, I still have them, either in use somewhere in the house or gathering dust. I also picked up a few other computers that I don’t actually use much, such as an original Compaq PC “luggable” (acquired in 1996), and a Sinclair ZX81 (2000). I have set up in my basement a Mac SE, an LC III and my old PowerMac G3 so I can boot up any pre-OS X Mac system if I need to access very old files or programs. Not that I’ve found much need to do so, as it has turned out. I’ve also left out computers my partner or daughter use (the odd iMac, iBook, or MacBook), not to mention a Newton MessagePad 110 (still works) and a Palm IIIx.

My first Mac cost $2500 in 1984. The most expensive was probably the 840av, at about $4700 in 1993. My most recent, the MacBook Pro 17”, was $2800, nominally higher in price than my first Mac, but only about $1300 in 1984 dollars. Plus, it’s about 325 times faster, has over 30,000 times a much memory, 12 times as much screen area (in full color), and weighs less than a third as much.

My all-time favorite so far is my current MacBook Pro. My least favorite was the HP Pavilion, which was incredibly cheap and underpowered, had a big blue light on the front that blinked on and off when it was asleep (I’M ASLEEP!... I’M ASLEEP!... I’M ASLEEP!) and would wake randomly for no apparent reason.