Oh gosh, this could be fun …
Well, back in the day I started with a good old BBC model B. Christmas 1983 I think.
1992 brought me an Epson EL2, back in the day when we still troubled ourselves to say a machine was ‘IBM compatible’ … no Windows though. It was a 286 and I had some version or other of DOS on it, with a very basic GUI shell for launching applications.
After university I joined the Windows 95 bandwagon and went to Escom where I bought a tower PC with (I think) an early Pentium processor. But that machine didn’t have a modem installed, so when it became highly desirable to have internets at home …
I went to John Lewis in around 2001 and bought one of the ‘five colors’ iMacs, original wedge shape, in indigo. It had OS9 pre-installed but I upgraded it to OS X when that came out. I started out with NTL’s 3-2-1-0 phone package, with a second line dedicated to their free dial up internet, but eventually upgraded to 512k broadband with a shiny Terayon Terajet modem.
That iMac lasted 5 or 6 years but eventually had its network card fried by a thunderstorm (the house RCD protected the electrical connection but there was a nasty power surge on the phone line that took out my broadband modem and Ethernet). Insurance paid for a brand new …
Flat panel iMac, my first with an Intel CPU. White with a USB keyboard. Can’t remember any of the tech specs now.
Five years or so later and my next iMac due to increasing amounts of software incompatibility. Around 10 years ago was, I think, probably around the worst time for Apple forcing obsolescence like this. My latest iMac is a 21.5” mid 2011 model, 2.7GHz Intel core i5. I upped the memory to 20GB and it still does almost everything I want it to; OS upgraded as far as Sierra (10.12.6) and won’t go any further so that will worsen with time. Still, it has lasted far longer than any Apple computer I’ve owned previously.
In the meantime, I’ve also had an original iPad, an original iPad Air, and now a 4th generation iPad Air with Apple keyboard and pencil, and to be honest I do 90% of my work on it (I’m using it now). The only thing I regularly use the iMac for at the moment is an application called Worship Extreme Presenter, which creates slides for church containing hymns, Bible readings etc. There’s a request in to the developer to produce an iPad app which they’re considering. If they do that, then I will no longer have any present need for a full desktop computer at all.