Oldschool

In a melancholy moment, I thought I would create a timeline of my computer history...

Microbee - When I was in primary school in ... well a long time ago. (About 84-85 IIRC) I was selected as a computer teacher to tutor other students (and a few teachers) in the basic operation of the systems. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee

Atari 2600 - Friends game system.  So many hours spent. (Late 80's?)

Apple IIc - Friends first computer.  Many hours spend playing Wizardry...explored my first computer graphics.... wrote simple games from a book I found at school and learned how to hack saved game files.....

Commodore 64 - An older student brought one of these to school and impressed us all. (85?)

Apple II - This was the first machine at highschool.  (86?) We learned Pascal programming on them. 
http://oldcomputers.net/appleii.html

Apple Macintosh - The school picked up a bunch of these.  I built my first game using Hypercard.  It was a graphical adventure game... before I even knew what adventure games were.  We were playing Trolls Tails and Where in the world is Carman Sandiego.... so they probably seeded the ideas.

Apple IIgs - I remember we had one of these in the computer room.  It was a bit special and I don't remember doing much with it.  Mostly used Macs all through high school.

IBM PC??? - We were taken to the Industrial Arts room and allowed to look at the only PC in the school. It was running a plotter!!!  Whoot.  It was about all I knew about them for years.

TAFE years

486sx - My first computer that I owned. (Not counting calculators and watches etc)  I bought it for $500 bucks and if memory serves it has a 100MB HD and some nominal amount of RAM.   This got upgraded to a 486dx2 66 chip at some point, had more RAM added and finally a bigger 500MB HD.  It had part of the wiring harness terminated backward which blew the fuse on the big HD when it was turned on.  That HD cost more than $500 at the time, so you can only imagine the utter shock.  Thankfully I knew this hardware guy who managed to return it as defective and got me another one... which did exactly the same thing before we figured out what was going on.... I just about fainted when my computer killed the second one.  They figured it out and I cut the offending wires out of the wiring loom myself....

Generic Compaq/Dell/Gateway machines in the labs very non-descript and totally forgettable.  I learned about Windows 3.1 and 3.11 with Novel Netware as the Network OS. How to work my way through the network configuration and boot scripts to get the damn things to boot and be stable.  I did so many certificates and diplomas in quick succession that its a bit of a blur.

My personal machines grew and evolved...

586 -> Pentium.  More RAM, Bigger Disks, Better Monitors, new Motherboards as I killed the old ones...

Pentium II at some point.  Then I think I got into AMD chips around this time...

I think they are all still in the garage except the 486dx2.

I finally upgrade to an AMD Athlon 64 which was my last hand built PC.  It had a couple of graphics cards go through it, various RAM and HD's.  It was a workbench type computer... mostly had its guts hanging out and a couple of 19" HP monitors.  Its where my love of dual head computers started.

For the past couple of years, I have been on HP laptops from work.  They are nice and stable but lack a little of the crazy early years of needing to jiggle cables or re-run an audio casset to get a program to start.

I now maintain a small network of media centers and servers with various OS's using all recycled bits at home.  The kids are getting bigger and have outgrown their first laptops.... I will be building them their first workstations soon....

My parents have moved from an origional IBM 8088 to (I think...) a 486 or very early pentium running Windows 95 at the moment.  They still use a tractor feed dot matrix printer and it does what they need.

My work machines have grown in capacity, with my current box being a i7 running a quad-head configuration with Win7 Enterprise.  It's nice and does what it should (mostly... part from the network adapter not waking up sometimes from sleep mode) but it still not much different from where I started.  The hardware is quite identifiable... the software still uses the same models.... the concepts are the same..  Its faster and more stable thankfully and I have not lost work to a crash or bad backup in years.... but.... honestly.... very little has fundamentally changed.  Most of the skills I learned are still relevant.  Lots of details have changed over the years, the bugs have evolved and the viruses are more invasive.... Oh and I still can't affor "cutting edge" gear....