I am not too sure what I will put in here, but for sure I will include details of some of the computers I have owned and used. In 1986 I bought an XT clone, 4.7 MHz, 8086 processor, disk drive and a basic graphics card. On my first trip through Singapore I wanted to buy a 5MB hard drive. Instead I was able to buy a 10 MB drive for the same price!! Wow! And so it went on. Today I have 2 PCs and 2 laptops in the house. My wife uses one PC and tries to steal away my little IBM X21, which I resist because I love its size, reliability and ease of use. I will also write something about my progression into the world of open source software, Linux operating system and OpenOffice.org. Stay tuned.
Click the + sign on the left side of the title bars below to read more about the individual machines.

Read about the Microbee in the Wikipedia

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Summary:  Around 1978 Owen Hill teamed up with an electronic components company, Applied Technology of Hornsby (Sydney), to build a small computer he had designed. It was based on a Zilog Z80 with up to 32 Kbytes of RAM plus 32 Kbytes of ROM holding Microworld Australia Basic, a TV display of 16 lines by 64 characters, and they sold it as a kit. The Microbee flew - the range was extended and several hundred thousand were made during the 1980s. It was sold to Australian schools and exported to Sweden and Russia. Microbee was overtaken by the PC avalanche and went out of business in the late 1980s.

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And so to my own experiences. In 1984 I assembled a "Microbee" from a kit of parts. I remember going home from work early and working until around 2am to finish it. It did not work. At 7am next morning I found the one wiring mistake and away it went.
I think I started with 16MB RAM, eventually expanded to 32MB; programs were loaded and saved onto audio cassettes - but not every cassette recorder worked! It was a real tinkerer's delight. I built an EEPRom burner, printer port interface to a Model 14 (from 1945) teletype machine I had in my amateur radio room for radio teletype and overall enjoyed working with it as a hobby/learning thing.
Although the PC was starting to take off with MS-DOS, the bee ran with CP/M if you had one with a disk drive, otherwise it was assembly language and/or a version of Basic. I had a disk version in the mid 1980s but time was running out for the little bee and by 1985 I decided I had to have a PC-XT.

I have to think of something here.....

What can one say at this distance. 4.77MHz, Floppy disk drive and MSDOS. Graphics was 640x480 if you were lucky, probably color but only just. Some people used Hercules graphics cards to increase screen resolution - but not in colour. Drivers were always a problem - remember this predated Internet availability - we used bulletin boards to communicate. Modems were typically 300baud so speed was never very good.
One good thing was a hinged lid on the case, access was super easy.
I overclocked my PC to get around 10 MHz speed, not sure if it made much difference.
Software that I used at this time was WordPerfect 4.x, Lotus 1-2-3 and various utilities like Norton Utilities that were essential for everyday use.

From PC Magazine:  Toshiba's wildly popular T1000 brought DOS in a truly lap-friendly portable size. The T1000 measured 12 by 2 by 11 inches and weighed 6.4 pounds--a veritable featherweight compared with suitcase-size luggables, and more than 3.5 pounds lighter than its nearest competitor, the Datavue Spark. It was also cheaper than most laptops of its time. The T1000's durable clamshell design accommodated a full-size 82-key keyboard, a 720KB 3.5-inch floppy drive, 512KB of RAM, and an internal modem. The unit embedded MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM--which eliminated the need to have two floppy drives, as some competing notebooks of that era had, but also made it impossible to use certain software (such as WordPerfect Executive, which required two disks to run). To achieve its size and cost, the T1000 made some sacrifices in CPU and battery performance. Nonetheless, this model helped catapult Toshiba to the fore of mobile computing, and it paved the way for the next wave of laptops, including number 18 on our list, HP's OmniBook 300 (above). (You can read the T1000 quick-reference guide at this fan site.)

I used this in Indonesia from 1989 to 1992.

The handle is a really neat thing, also you can detach the screen from the case to make it much easier to use with an external monitor.
For its time it was a very nice machine.
I produced many documents for the Bridge Management System Project on this computer.

Acquired this when I returned to Australia in 1996, used it in PNG and India - became Gabrielle's introduction to computing.


Technical details to come.

This is my current workhorse computer. Bought in 2004 or so, a P4 2.8Ghz processor, 160GB HD, 1GB RAM and a decent display.
As is typical with many Toshiba machines, all the extra bits function only under Windows. The standby/resume functions have always been a problem under Linux, Standby to Disk works, to RAM does not. Many times the ACPI gets hooked up with something in the system and it takes 3 or 4 tries to get it to boot up.
Despite all of this, it works well.
Currently running SuSE 10.3 on it and heaps of software.
It seems reasonably robust.

A PIII based 12" display laptop. Really great for what it is. This was my first Thinkpad and I used it daily as a commuting tool. A bit slow, and limited in memory expansion.

The photo is not of mine!

A PIV based 12" display laptop. Really great for what it is. I used it daily as a commuting tool.

A PIV based 12" display laptop. Very small, light, good battery life. In my eyes the only drawback is the use of a 1.8" hard drive. With only 40GB fitted as standard, and the non availability of large capacity drives of this type, it was a bit limited for me. So now my wife uses the X40 as her portable and is very happy with it.

A Centrino Duo based 12" display laptop. A super little computer. Fitted it up with 4GB RAM and a 300GB HDD and use it everywhere. With WLAN built in and a USB high speed modem it is almost always on line somewhere.