Geek-out time! I just read a post about all the computers this guy owned in his life. Great idea!

Apple Lisa
My dad brought home our first computer probably around '87. It was an ancient relic already at the time, but considering that it would have cost $10k new, that's not such a bad thing. It had an unheard of 1MB of RAM, and ours came with three ProFile hard drives (the unit on top of the computer in the picture) with a whopping 2MB each! It was a very hardcore system at the time. It also had a dot matrix and daisywheel printer with it.

I used it to play around with mostly. I used the spreadsheet program to enter all the performance data of all the cars in different car magazines to compare. It was also my introduction into computer graphics, where I used the LisaDraw program to make pictures of my mother's Volkswagen and modify it with wheels, skirts and 2-tone paint jobs (despite the monochrome monitor).

This was also my introduction to GUI based computing... it worked very similarly to a Macintosh. At one point there was a trade-in program offered by Apple where you could get a Mac Plus as an even trade for it. Stupidly we didn't take it, and the display's power supply died a month later.

Tandy 1000 SL/2
Mine wasn't exactly as pictured, it had a separate display. This was my first DOS-based machine. It was a pretty weak machine, even at the time... but still cost $2k. It came with Tandy's suite of programs, including some basic office software and a music program. The audio card was actually pretty high-tech for a pre-Soundblaster card. It could record and edit audio, and was able to play 3 sounds at a time. The graphics sucked big time, they were just a step above CGA, in that it allowed for 16 colours.

The coolest thing about this one is I eventually got a modem for it in 91. This is where I got into BBSing and eventually got onto the Internet... although at the time there was no WWW, so it pretty much meant Usenet to me. I frequented alt.rave, alt.techno and the WNYSOR-L mailing list. That was such a huge deal at the time.

Macintosh SE/30
The next few are actually work machines. This was the first one we started using for graphics at work. I'm not sure, but I think we had 16MB of RAM, which was a lot again. This model had an expansion slot where we housed a video card that drove a 21" Radius monochrome monitor.

We used early versions of QuarkXPress 3.1, and Adobe Illustrator 3. This one was a couple years old when we got it. It worked reasonably well, considering most of what we used it for was type.

Macintosh IIx
Our first colour graphics computer. We upgraded it with a Radius Rocket accelerator card and 32MB of RAM, which gave it speed comparable to the Quadra 950—the benchmark of the time. The only problem is it broke audio playback.

Power Macintosh 8100/80
This was a pretty kick-ass machine in '94! It was part of Apple's first PowerPC computers. We had a Radius 20" colour monitor, a 1GB hard drive and 80MB of RAM. We actually kept this machine in production up until two years ago when we picked up a few higher-end machines from a customer for cheap to replace this old workhorse. It drove our scanner and did much of our crunch work for years.

Assorted Macs and PCs
We went through a bunch of computers at work after this... pretty much every Macintosh model that came out for a while, from the 7100/100 to dual G4 server. I didn't really have a computer I used personally all the time, because we needed a few different computers each to keep up with the two of us. This is also where we started buying PCs again. None of these boxes I can really consider being "mine," so they don't count.

This was probably the best computer I had. It was relatively fast at 300mHz, had 96MB of RAM and a small 3GB hard drive. But it had wireless and it was absolutely bulletproof. I dropped it from shoulder height flat on the ground once. I thought it was completely dead, it wouldn't start or anything. But once I reinstalled the system software everything was fine again.

It ran OS X, but it wasn't too happy about it. I didn't really use it at work much, since it was a little underpowered, even compared to the 300mHz desktop G3s I was using. The display was only 800x600 pixels, and with no support for an external display there wasn't much I could do with it.

Eventually I traded it with a friend for an eMac, but I was sad to see it go. I had upgraded the HD to a 30GB for her myself (not a task for the weak), and it still felt good.

My current HTPC
Like most PCs it's just a mismash of parts. It's got some decent stats though, 3.x gHz P4 or something, some kick ass nVidia gaming card, a gig of RAM, a few 300 gig hard drives. This is my media centre. I use it to watch and record HDTV, download video, play games, DVDs, and it displays at my TV's native resolution. It's all I use. Instead of cable I've got an antenna that picks up the Toronto HDTV channels. I've played around with a lot of different software, but right now I'm happy with Windows Media Center. It works well enough. I've wanted to replace it with a Mac-based solution, but really there's no reason to fix what's not broken.

If there's any problem with it (other than all the spyware that I STILL occasionally manage to find), it's that it's too noisy. I was going to replace it with a Dell as a server with an AppleTV as a front end, but I would actually be losing native resolution support, and support for DiVX and other codecs.

PowerBook G4
This is my current main computer. I've had it for two years now and it's been awesome. I carry it back and forth between home and work. It's great, especially now that I can VPN to work, it's like I'm practically there. I plug it into an old 17" Apple Cinema Display when I'm in the office and use my PC to share my keyboard and mouse over the network. Its a brilliant setup, since I have one keyboard and mouse and I can scroll across a PC and two Mac displays, and I can still copy and paste text! I'm very happy, but I'm starting to get tempted by newer and faster machines...

What's next?
It's tough, because I'm tempted to get a desktop machine that I can just leave at work. I don't mind carrying my computer back and forth, but there are days like when I ride my bike to the office where I really don't want to have an extra 15 pounds worth of crap on my back. At the same time, the new, cheap MacBooks are at least twice as fast as my current computer. Especially now with Adobe CS3 coming out it's even MORE tempting.

What I'd really like is a computer that slots between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro. I don't need all the expansion (or price tag) of the Pro, but the Mini is kinda lacking for me. It's a tough call. I like the iMac, but I'd really prefer to have the option of what display to use. Maybe I'll just wait to see what comes out next.