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Neverminding the original price of the Apple I.

Hmm, after posting, I did some googling and found this:

Western Digital had a contract with DEC to supply chipsets for the DEC LSI-11 computer. When DEC suddenly canceled the contract, Western Digital found themselves stuck with a warehouse full of useless LSI-11 chipsets. In an attempt to salvage at least some of their investment they went looking for something else to do with the parts. The chipsets were microprogrammed and consisted of up to six chips: a RALU (Register ALU) chip, a controller sequencer chip, and up to four microcode ROMs. The UCSD p-System and UCSD Pascal were very popular at the time and Western Digital decided that there might be a market for a machine that ran the p-System as its native Operating System. They disposed of the useless LSI-11 microcode ROMs and developed new microcode for the UCSD p-Machine instruction set (p-Code). Thus creating a new machine from the ashes of an old one.

A 80186? That is really weird. As far as I know, the 80186 was only used for embedded applications, and never made it into a general-purpose PC.
It was rare, but it did make into normal PCs. I used a Siemens PC-D during my education. It was a bit slow, had a non-standard keyboard, non-standard graphic controller, an on-board hardware debugger (which defaulted to german keyboard layout) and the BIOS was a bit weird.

hey i'd take a Commodore 16 over a VIC20 any day ...

Man am I a geek and boy is this off topic, but still: As far as I remember Aprictor never really made an IBM Compatible computer, at least not in the beginning. What they produced, however, was an Intel based computer that could run MS-DOS. The downside was they they never cloned the BIOS and some other stuff.

What this meant was that many MS-DOS (or PC-DOS as it was mostly known as at the time) programs could run on the Apricot machines, but a lot of programs adressed hardware and called routines in BIOS directly, and those programs never ran on the Apricots. This was a major shortcoming at the time.

Check this article. It seems to verify my memory of Apricot and PC Compatibility. Take a look at the pictures as well. These machines were stylish, even by today's standards.

Well, if you're going to get into heavy monstrosties of computers, why not mention the Osborne

It's the spirit of Adam Osborne, pioneer of the luggable computer!

If we're speaking technically, my first computer was a Little Professor calculator. If we're talking something that could be used for programming, then we have to count the the Atari 2600 with its Basic Programming cartridge and controllers. If we're talking first, full-fledged machine, then mine was an Atari 800XL.

He's also wrong in claiming they were the first 32 bit systems available. I hate articles like this because nobody ever mentions any computers from outside of the United States.

The Amiga 1200 was launched in December 1992 but before that a British company called Acorn Computers released the Archimedes range of computers, the next generation after their 8 bit systems (Atom, BBC A/B/B+, Master, Master Compact). Starting with the A305, A310, A410 & A440 in mid 1989 these machines had 32bit ARM2 processors (from which the Intel XScale/StrongARM chips out now originated), the Arthur (later RISCOS (Screenshot) operating system in ROM (instant bootup!), wonderful GUI, built in BBC Basic and easy ARM assembler access, 8 channel stereo sound, etc.

My first computer was a BBC B in 1982 (which should have been mentioned for it's incredible robustness and shedload of I/O ports.. you could link it to anything, oh and for being the machine the original version of Elite was written for) to an Acorn A3000 in 1990, before going PC 94'ish. Shortly after Linux appeared so all was ok again ;)

...this baby or this one, coupled with some of this along with some free time...?

...this baby or this one, coupled with some of this along with some free time...?

Ahem, the VIC-20 had 5K of RAM. (Here's another link. The 3 KiB they mention is the amount of RAM available to programs after the OS and display memory are subtracted. That's probably why it's listed as "3KiB, 5KiB".)

Perhaps you're confusing the VIC-20 with the Commodore Plus/4? That thing had 64K of RAM, and four productivity apps built into ROM. So, maybe you had a VIC-20 but wished you had the Commodore 64 or Commodore Plus/4?

My brother has a good database with first-hand accounts of many older machines at www.machine-room.org. He owns a good chunk of the machines represented therein himself.

16K. Beat that.

Although I amused that it apparently had a 3.3 MHz processor, yet the PCjr I got next appeared to kick its ass at 4.77.

16K. Beat that.

Although I amused that it apparently had a 3.3 MHz processor, yet the PCjr I got next appeared to kick its ass at 4.77.