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What was your favorite computer, and why?

 
Bartender
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I'm lovin' the "Computer Nostalgia" thread, but now I want to know something more specific. It's clear that a lot of us go back in computing a few years, long enough that we've had the opportunity to work with a lot of different machines. One comes to like or dislike a given computer for any number of reasons: it was the first one you actually programmed; you made a ton of money using it; you did something with it that made you famous; it helped you understand a concept that had eluded you before; it was a pretty color. I'd be curious to know more about people's favorites.

Oh, and you must also defend your choice.

So, what was (or, has been so far) your favorite computer, and why?
 
Stevens Miller
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For me, it was this one:



Reasons:

1. It combined a reasonable implementation of BASIC with a zippy enough processor, simplistic sound support, and rudimentary color graphics into a tidy, affordable package you could really do something with.

2. It had hardware sprite support. No surprise, considering who made it, but it meant you could actually write some nifty graphics games, in BASIC, that would have been a real challenge without them.

3. Atari published the system API, and you could really do a lot (again, in BASIC) if you used it.

4. It looked pretty spiffy, I thought.

5. You could actually believe the vendor might last the year.

6. It had expansion options that were affordable and worked.

All in all, I remember it as the first machine I felt was really within my ability to understand, that could also do more than just print my biorhythm charts. (Never did quite get used to where they located the Return key, the only flaw in an otherwise excellent early keyboard. Have always wondered how much damage that one choice did to the overall market's enthusiasm for this thing.)
 
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For a while, I was using an iMac G4 as my kitchen computer (yes, I keep a computer in my kitchen).

It was second-hand, outdated when I bought it, slow as hell (comparatively), and the screen had some problems.



Why did I love it? Because it looked cool as %&*$. Still some of the best industrial design ever, in my opinion.
 
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I'd have to say the Amiga series. The CPU was the Motorola MC68000, which had straightforward byte ordering and a regular instruction set, unlike the hopscotch Intel stuff. The core OS was an object-oriented microkernel. It was the first consumer computer to feature stereo separation and Total Harmonic Distortion on the box, and was the first consumer computer to make extensive use of DMA and specialized hardware co-processor. I have one of almost every model, from the A1000 currently serving as a lamp-stand (with slide-under keyboard), the consumer-oriented CDTV, the hobby=grade A1200 and the business-model A2000, A3000 and A4000 (of infamously weak power supply). All of them worked at last count except the A4000, because the infamously weak power supply blew out. Shame. It was a nice machine.

In fact, the only standard feature that the Amiga line didn't offer that we take for granted these days was virtual memory. The A1000 didn't have a hardware MMU, and that's what set the lowest-common-denominator for the OS.

It also did make me enough money to keep buying new Amigas. One of the very first commercial personal C++ development systems was my product, sold under the Lattice/SAS label. The Amiga's natural word size was a flat address space 32-bit address/32-bit integer which was a pretty straightforward port for the Bell Labs software I licensed, converted and repackaged. In contrast, the Macintosh was using the MC68000 as a 16-bit processor and the IBM PC was still using those gawdawful segment registers. The AT&T translator wasn't amenable to running in phases like old mainframe compilers did, so a segmented address model would have been a real nightmare to port to.

The A1000 came with 256K standard RAM, which almost everyone immediately upgraded (via a front-panel port) to 512M. More ambitous users hung additional memory, disk controllers, etc. off the side. Oh yeah - forgot. The Amiga also was the first to feature an intelligent and auto-configuring (jumperless) bus, before IBM's Micro-Channel, EISA or PCI buses.

The OS was also quite efficient. I had a full-blown C++ development system running in 6MB including side utilities. I tried installing Linux with X on the A4000 and it took 16MB, same as the equivalent Intel setup did.

Audio-video people loved the Amiga. Out of the box it would plug directly into an NTSC or PAL tuner with what were for the day (and its broadcast quality standards) good-quality video in an era where IBM graphics were an add-on card and the Mac was still monochrome. The Video Toaster card was described by one enthusiast as "the equivalent of getting a Mercedes-Benz for $100". They were popular with TV stations for in-house special effects because of the relatively low cost, and used for special effects and CGI for movies like RoboCop II, SeaQuest DSV and some of the Babylon 5 TV series.

I was sad to see the line die. Unfortunately, they demonstrated in a way that should be recorded in textbooks that a bad management can ruin even the best of products.
 
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My first laptop-Dell Inspiron 14R(1st gen Core i3/3 GB/320 GB/Windows 7), bought in 2010.
By now most of my friends have got their second/third laptop,
but this old man is still performing (considering the fact that here in summer most of the time room temperature remains above 30 degrees centigrade, not good for laptops).
 
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Tim Holloway wrote:I'd have to say the Amiga series. The CPU was the Motorola MC68000, which had straightforward byte ordering and a regular instruction set, unlike the hopscotch Intel stuff. The core OS was an object-oriented microkernel.


Agree. The OS also had preemtive multitasking, which was more advanced than even Microsoft Windows 3.1 (which had cooperative multitasking).
 
Greenhorn
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Its simply & superb to use an apple PC and also its not just an ordinary computer its amazing computer.
 
Tim Holloway
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Jesper de Jong wrote:

Tim Holloway wrote:I'd have to say the Amiga series. The CPU was the Motorola MC68000, which had straightforward byte ordering and a regular instruction set, unlike the hopscotch Intel stuff. The core OS was an object-oriented microkernel.


Agree. The OS also had preemtive multitasking, which was more advanced than even Microsoft Windows 3.1 (which had cooperative multitasking).



Actually, the Amiga had pre-emptive real-time multitasking, which made it more suited to performance-oriented audio-video work. Even modern-day Linux isn't real-time out of the box.

Windows 3.1 did have pre-emptive multitasking, but there was a "gotcha". The DOS boxes you created were each independent VMs dispatched pre-emptively, but the primary Windows GUI session dispatched co-operatively. Since the whole point of running Windows was that GUI, it kind of minimized the advantage.
 
Greenhorn
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My favourite computer would be my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop, which I purchased way back in...2008.

She is a 17" model with a "ruby red" covering, and is why I call her "Dorothy". My main reason for buying "Dot" was because of the book Masters of Doom which is the story of Id software, and there is a brilliant moment where John Carmack is annoyed with his co-workers for making too much noise and so he packs up his machine and declaires he would get more done at home...he returned weeks later with the basic code for the Doom engine. I had made my mind up, when possible, to get a laptop so when surrounded by noise I could just locate to another room!

Good'ol Dot saw me through my degree and my raycasting engine written in Java. Imagine it; Watching Airwolf in corner of the screen whilst beavering away at a simple "3D" demo! Bliss! Sadly, Vista became unusable to me due to a poor update from Microsoft and so I made the decision to take another leaf from Masters of Doom, where John Carmack says that we have it easy today, where one only needs a 2nd hand computer and a linux disc to progress to any level of skill as a programmer...so now she is running ubuntu and now I can program C with gcc.

Dell gets a lot of flack, but I've always been happy with their machines. The Inspiron 1720 is my most prized possesion...well, save for my tatty copy of Masters of Doom!

 
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Tim Holloway wrote:
I was sad to see the line die. Unfortunately, they demonstrated in a way that should be recorded in textbooks that a bad management can ruin even the best of products.



I recently read this history of the Amiga and it was very interesting (and tragic!). It was some amazing technology for the time. My only experience with an Amiga was when I was working in the computer lab in college and had to do a memory upgrade for a professor. IIRC, it involved pulling the CPU, plugging in a riser, mounting the CPU and having to run a lead from the daughterboard to somewhere and the penalty for doing it wrong was possibly bricking the machine. No pressure!
 
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