I have too many computers.  There.  I said it. My friends and family all tell me to get rid of some of this stuff.  They roll their eyes when I get excited about some new piece of junk equipment.  But I can't help myself, I never saw a computer, radio or television sitting in a dusty corner at the Goodwill that I didn't want to take home and restore or tinker with or disassemble, etc.  I can't even go near Ebay without spending $150 on something nobody in their right mind would spend $150 for. So I thought it would be fun to try to enumerate (that's fancy programmer talk for 'list') all my computers.  I am going to take a shot at it now, off the top of my head.  Hang on, here we go...

Commodore

I love commodore.  The first computer I ever actually owned was a Commodore 64.  I think I got it for Christmas in 1982 or 1983, and I spent a large chunk of my youth programming, calling bulletin boards, and playing games.  I got my Amiga 1000 for Christmas in 1986 and it was nirvana.  Nothing has ever come close to the awe I had for my first Amiga.

  • 1ea Commodore VIC-20
  • 2ea Commodore 64
  • 1ea Commodore SX-64
  • 3ea Amiga 1000
  • 1ea Amiga 3000

Apple

My school district bought Apple ][+ computers in either 1980 or 1981 and they had no idea what to do with them.  Some educational professional must have reasoned that if computers have a keyboard and electric typewriters have a keyboard it therefore makes sense that computers belong in the typing lab.  Which is where the new Apples landed.  It is also what we did with them; learned how to type.  However, I was not satisfied with merely typing random letters on the keyboard.  Within a week I was learning BASIC and shortly after that I dove straight into Machine Language.  I still have my first ever Floppy Disk.  Elephant Memory Systems - Elephant Never Forgets.

  • 1ea Apple //e
  • 1ea Apple //c
  • 1ea Laser 128
  • 1ea Mac 512K (?)
  • 1ea Mac SE/30 (?)
  • 1ea Mac Performa (?)
  • 1ea Mac Power Book 150 (?)
  • 1ea Mac Ruby G3
  • 1ea Mac iBook G3
  • 1ea Mac Mini G4
  • 2ea Power Mac G4
  • 1ea Mac PowerBook G4 (Titanium)
  • 2ea Power Mac G5
  • 2ea Mac RAID
  • 1ea Power Mac (Intel 8 core)
  • 1ea MacBook Pro (i7 2010)

Radio Shack

The first computer I ever touched was a TRS-80 Model I.  My Dad was managing a Radio Shack store when the first Model I arrived.  To my 10 year old mind it was absolutely the coolest thing ever (well, short of Star Wars anyway).  I remember my Dad struggling to get the tape player to load a game called 23 matches, which I played endlessly in the store.  It was about this same time I read Issac Asimov's book "Adding a Dimension" and being fascinated by the chapter "One, Ten, Buckle my Shoe" which was about binary number systems.  Unfortunately, I didn't connect binary math and computers until I started programming on the Apple ][+.

  • 1ea TRS-80 Model 100
  • 1ea TRS-80 Color Computer

PC (Brand-name)

I loathed PC's.  Hated them.  It was a religion.  PC's sucked and only idiots bought them.  Of course, back in 1990, if you were cruising along on your U.S. Robotics Courier 9600 HST with your multi-tasking Amiga 3000 while playing MOD files in the background and someone showed you a PC running Windows 3.0 it was easy to snort in derision.  With supreme irony I somehow ended up turning programming PC's into a career.  I also managed to collect quite a few along the way.

  • 1ea Epson PS2 L40 SX
  • 1ea Acer Notebook (?)
  • 1ea Panasonic CF-41 Notebook (486)
  • 6ea Dell Desktop (P60) (?)
  • 1ea Dell Inspirion (?)
  • 1ea Intel ThinkPad (P60) (?)
  • 3ea Gateway Notebooks (?)
  • 1ea Compaq Presario V4000
  • 1ea Dell Desktop (P4)
  • 1ea HP Pavillion (P4)
  • 1ea HP Pavillion (AMD A8)

PC (Homebrew)

Maybe the single greatest thing about PCs is that you can build your own.  You have ultimate control over speed, memory, storage, peripherals, operating system, etc.  Back when Computer Shopper was an inch thick and mail order clones were in vogue, I worked for a company called Fast Micro as a technical support representative.  During that period of my life I built, configured, and repaired thousands of 386 and 486 systems.  I hated doing technical support, but I have a huge library of technical documentation for motherboards and multi-i/o cards from those days.

  • 1ea "Bridgette" P3
  • 1ea "Gaming Rig" I7

Concluson

Whew!  I think that's all of them.  I didn't even bother to try listing peripherals or the associated piles of junk I have collected (cases, motherboards, disk drives, hard drives, audio cards, video cards, cd-roms, etc.).  I've got a mountain of books and manuals, and (quite literally) a dozen legal boxes full of software.  It's quite a lot to store, and even harder to actually get stuff out and set it up but I am slowly getting organized.  In the future I hope to add a Comodore 128 and an Amiga 2000 to my collection.  I would also very much like to get some Atari gear; maybe a nice 800 XL with some disk drives.  Anyway, thanks for taking a trip down "inventory lane" with me.  Cheers!

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