Post your computer experience timeline - what machines you used.

[galacticstone]

I thought it might be interesting to see how others got their feet wet with computers and what path did you take to end up where you are today?

I started out in the early-mid 1980's with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. (the old "trash 80")

Radio Shack TRS-80 ---> Commodore 64 ---> IBM Clone 8088 ---> Dell 286 ---> Dell Pentium I ---> Compaq Pentium III ---> Acer Aspire One Notebook (Atom) ---> Acer One Ten Notebook ---> my current machine (Lenovo Ideapad 14).

I am skipping over a few redundant machines, but these were the major stepping stones I took. All of my previous machines were DOS or Windows. My Lenovo is my first experience with Linux. It felt so good to take a brand new Windows machine and wipe all traces of Microsoft from it. LOL.

How did you get here?

[Frogs Hair]

Home systems-1999 gateway essential pc upgraded to xp and then bought a bare-bones kit (2007)ish with an ASUS mobo and AMD CPU and have been upgrading hardware and peripherals ever since . Added an HP Elite Book with docking station in 2014 The Boston Acoustics speakers from the gateway still sound great. I saw a PC World article for Ubuntu 9.10 and tried Wubi which led me here.

Work-various Windows loaded machines, HP-UX in-circuit testing fixtures and even an old Tandy 102 for defect data collection.

[lisati]

My first hands-on experience was circa 1976, with a Burroughs mainframe at my Dad's work, the exact model number is currently buried beyond easy recollection, later followed by a Wang 2200 at school.

On the home front, I started with a Casio PB-100, which was little more than a calculator programmable in a subset of BASIC.

From there, a VZ300->a couple of MS-DOS machines->a couple of Commodore 128s->a DEC machine (my first Windows machine), a Compaq desktop, a couple of Toshiba laptops, and a Compaq laptop. Most have fairly modest specs by today's standards, and are in varied states of functionality.

(The VZ300, an interesting beast, is long gone. Some of the smelly blue smoke that powered it leaked out one day, and it didn't work too well after that.)

[QIII]

Also circa '76, Unix and too many machines to bother to remember.

[galacticstone]

My first hands-on experience was circa 1976, with a Burroughs mainframe at my Dad's work, the exact model number is currently buried beyond easy recollection, later followed by a Wang 2200 at school.

On the home front, I started with a Casio PB-100, which was little more than a calculator programmable in a subset of BASIC.

From there, a VZ300->a couple of MS-DOS machines->a couple of Commodore 128s->a DEC machine (my first Windows machine), a Compaq desktop, a couple of Toshiba laptops, and a Compaq laptop. Most have fairly modest specs by today's standards, and are in varied states of functionality.

(The VZ300, an interesting beast, is long gone. Some of the smelly blue smoke that powered it leaked out one day, and it didn't work too well after that.)

I thought I had heard of everything, but VZ is new to me. The casing reminds me of a Commodore VIC.

[lisati]

I thought I had heard of everything, but VZ is new to me. The casing reminds me of a Commodore VIC.

The one I had came from an Australian electronics retailer, and was a Z80A-based machine. Some assembly language software for the TRS-80 could be adapted, due to the similarity of some of the system calls in ROM. I read somewhere that a version was marketed in the UK, under a different brand name.

[DuckHook]

Olivetti Programma 203, then a Basic 4 BB1, big jump to a DEC VAX 750, then downhill from there with a succession of comparatively boring PCs. Your thread has brought a tear to my eye. I do miss those old clunkers, especially the Olivetti, which was decades ahead of its time.

[djchandler]

Atari 400/800/800XL, Atari ST (my friend owned an Atari only store), Mac+, Custom built 80486, DEC VAX via modem, Mac SE, Mac Quadra, and still the last 25 or so years to account for with many self-built, re-cycled, rescued and re-pupurposed computers. I'm running a Intel NUC clone (Gigabyte) now with memory and a hard drive recovered from a laptop with coffee stains on the motherboard.

[galacticstone]

This is fun and interesting. Thank you everyone for the responses.

I left out several redundant PC's from my list. I've owned a bunch of Microsoft-powered desktops over the years. I've used every version of Windows from 95 up to 10. And I always had issues of one kind or another with Windows. I just never considered switching to a different OS.

Here is a quick little story - back in 2000/2001, I lived in Oxford Mississippi. I worked for a janitorial service (jobs were hard to come by in that little town) and one of our clients was a business called "Sair Linux". I didn't think much of it at the time, but since then I have learned that some of the people involved with Sair were key early players in the evolution of Linux. Even though I did not know it at the time, I was getting a glimpse of my future OS. We (my wife and I) would go in after hours to clean the place. More often than not, there were one or two employees there who would work into the wee hours of the morning. They were nice to us and we'd sometimes chat a little. One guy had a habit of sleeping there - I think he almost lived there.

I wonder now what happened to those folks. Are they still involved with Linux, or did they move on to something else?

[gordintoronto]

IBM 1401, System /360 Model 40, Model 20, Model 25, Model 85, Model 168.
Commodore PET, SuperPET, 64, 128.
A multi-user CP/M machine whose name escapes me. One hard drive, per-user processor boards, long cables to terminals.
Several 286 or 386-based PCs, then an AMD custom design.
My current daily driver, home-made AMD Phenom II on Gigabyte motherboard.
HP and Lenovo laptops.
A Dell server which exceeds the combined performance of all those computers, two Xeons with 48 GB of memory.

Not bad for 53 years.