For some reason, I decided to recount the various computers I have used in my life.
Digicomp -- a machine made of oddly shaped plastic layers, small metal rods and small straws. I don't remember very much about this 'toy'. I think it was purchased from the Edmund Scientific catalog sometime in the mid 1960s. It was a mechanical device. You pushed a lever at one end which made the various layers of plastic pieces move back and forth. The straw pieces controlled the program by varying the movement. This isn't a good explanation at all. It was a long time ago. I think you can find out more about this computer on the internet
The second computer I used was in a class in 10th grade at Bentley High School, in Livonia Michigan (1969-1970). I believe it was made by Borroughs, an early company that was located near Detroit. It looked like a large metal desk. To program it you put small pins in holes in what looked like cribage boards (but with more holes!). These boards were plugged in to desktop. I wasn't really interested in computers in 10th grade, and I remember nearly nothing about this machine.
I don't think I used a computer again until I was studying electrical engineering at SUNY at Stonybrook (NY) in 1976 or 1977. The computer center at Stonybrook had a Univac 1170 mainframe style computer. As a sophomore, I had to code my programs on punch cards (Holerith or IBM cards). These card decks were submitted to the proverbial man in the white lab coat to be run on the computer. It was important to take a magic marker and write something on the side of these computer program decks, just in case you dropped a deck and had to put the cards back in order. Some time later, a print out of the results on green and white barred paper was available to find out what the program did. As a junior, I was allowed to use the Digital Equipment keyboard/printer terminals to edit and submit jobs.
While in college, Intel, Motorola, and others were producing the first microprocessor chips. I bought a Motorola 6800 chipset to build a small computer. I don't think I ever built that machine. However, some time later, I went to the first PC Expo type event in Atlantic City. It was the year before they legalized casinos, so it was the old fashioned Atlantic City, not the one that is there now. I bought a Z80 chip and some memory and a CPU card, and a memory card I guess, and built my first computer. I got the transformer for the power supply from some company in Queens or Brooklyn. I didn't have a case for quite a while... it sat on some wood I think. The keyboard was from Jade. In those days, keyboards had no electronics -- just two solder connectors for each key. You used a keyboard controller chip, and wired the whole thing up as a matrix. The controller pulsed a signal to each of the 'rows' of the matrix, row 1, then row 2, etc. Pressing a key connected the row to a column. You wrote the code to find out which column completed the circuit. Because there is a little chatter in the electrical connection when the key is pressed, you had to write more code to detect the keyboard bounce.
The Z80 had 8K of static RAM memory. I had a Tarbell tape drive that I never really got to work with it. Several years later I bought a Northstar floppy drive kit and got it to work. Eureka! That was maybe the most fun I ever had in 30 years of this business. Now, I had a REAL computer. It ran Basic even!
In 1978 I got my first job after college and worked on a Data General Eclipse, and a DEC 10 machine at Brookhaven Laboratories. I also worked on some Intel Multi-bus microcomputers.
1979 I went to work for a Gould/Simulation systems where I worked on a very small Data General computer.
I worked at Milton-Bradley in 1980 or so, and worked on several microprocessors that controlled various games. The development machine there was a VAX I believe.
Finally, in 1981 the business world had caught up to my own interests, and there were actually jobs where you could use personal computers. I worked for Microcom, in Norwood, MA. There I wrote terminal emulators for the Apple ][, Apple III, the first IBM PC and even the PC junior (code named Peanut!).
By this time I was making a little money, and I wanted my own real computer, so I got a $3000 loan from a bank to buy an Osborne II. That machine was ill-fated. In many ways it was better than the IBM machines. It ran CP/M and MSDOS, and had lots of technical documentation. But Osborne had a large supply of Osborne I computers that it couldn't sell once the Osborne II was announced. They went under a short time later.
My first PC was a Leading Edge. They were one of the first name brand clones of the IBM PC. Mine had a 20Meg hard disk I think. It was very cool!
Since then, a 286 machine, a 386 machine -- first one I had that I ran Windows on. A 486 machine that died from being turned on too soon after travelling in a very cold car for hundreds of miles. I replaced the guts of that with a Pentium with my father's financial assistance. Eventually that machine became my wife's when I bought a Microcenter P3 machine. Those machines are in heaven now. So, presently I have an Athlon that I am using now, and a P4.
There were some others probably.
Whew!