please empty your brain below
• 1995-1999: Amstad PC1512 (no hard drive!), another hand down but successfully interfaced with a dot matrix printer resulting in homework being submitted on that endless paper with the tear-off strips.
• 1999-2001: Siemens 486/50, first 'grown up' computer with Windows 3.1 etc, another hand-down from a pal of my Dad's. Destroyed in a botched upgrade effort.
• 2001-2006: assorted trigger's broom frankencomputers, half finished units scavenged and rebuilt, mostly low end Pentiums on Windows 95 then 98, occasoinally upgraded using RAM 'liberated' from redundant gutted RM units sitting around in the school store cupboards. Hooked up to the household internet as soon as broadband came onto the scene there. I have lost most of the expertise I gained in this period! At some point a laptop crept in for University but I forget the spec.. bought with EMA money, wasn't fancy.
• 2006-2007: Apple 'Blackbook', a short love affair, logic board unexpectedly died in a freak accident. The hard drive lives on in an external caddy.
• 2007-2011: HP laptop (forget spec!, picked up from CeX on Commercial Road in Portsmouth under duress to finish assignments).
• 2011-2016: iMac 21' 2010 spec, a product of the Apple refurbished store.
• 2016-2020: Mac Pro 5.1 2012, bought from an ex-employee of Apple at Gunwharf for a month's salary, with lofty ambitions of using it as a photo editing powerhouse. Never did. Sold last month.
• 2020-: Lenovo ThinkStation P500.
Then started building & upgrading PCs from components mainly using IBM PC XT & AT chassis, then towers for the kids, so no idea how many we got through. Had great fun playing Midtown Madness over the home network. First modem in 1992 to use for Dial up services such as yellow pages.
Got fed up with Microsoft Windows so switched to iMac in 2012, never looked back, complete Apple convert (although have to run MS Money using Parallels as have 22 years of my finances on it, not found a replacement).
I'll leave out the phones... Mixed in is also a Raspberry Pi and lots of Arduinos.
1980
Second hand Apple II....... and a new vic20 for the children
Later a C64 also for the children.
In the 1990's the firm where I worked ran a scheme for Tulip desk tops in exchange for vacation days.
1997 Internet takes off here.
1999
iMac
You know the one like a blue bowl
2007
Mac Book Pro
2008
iMac Intel 20"
2010
Mac book Air 13"
2016
iMac Intel 27"
2017
Mac book Air
2019
Ipad 10"
I missed the 16-bit era entirely but decided to join the internet revolution in 1996 with a Packard Bell PC which was horribly over-priced. I insisted to the Dixons employee that I needed 16mb of RAM rather than the 8mb installed and he scoffed that no-one would *ever* need that much RAM (I type this on an iMac with 16GB!)
I switched to using Linux at home in 1999 and subsequently bought a couple of Dell desktops and laptops in the 2000s, one of which survived as an email and web server until a year or two back, but my main desktop gave up the ghost in 2016 when I decided to invest in an iMac. I've never regretted the decision.
I do rather miss my old ZX81 though...
1988 - Amstrad CPC 464 (second hand, green screen)
1990 - Amstrad CPC 6128
1992 - Amiga 500 (second hand)
1993 - Amiga 1200
1998 - PII 266MHz 64MB PC (Windows, then Linux) for university work
2000 - 466MHz AMD K3 system (desktop), 2nd Hand HP Omnibook 4100 (laptop)
2002 - 700MHz AMD Duron System
2004 - 2GHz AMD Athlon (desktop)
2005 - Apple iBook 1.3GHz
2008 - Athlon X2 2500MHz (desktop)
2009 - Odd cheap purchase - 9" HP VIA C3 Laptop for couch surfing, still works but pointless)
2011 - Apple MacBook Pro (dodgy motherboard version, died for the second time in 2018)
2016 - Odd cheap purchase - £115 Lenovo Miix 11" tablet/laptop with terminally annoying trackpad (finally learned lesson - don't buy cheap bargain laptops)
2018 - HP Elitebook 745 (AMD Ryzen 2700U) because MacBook Pro died.
I've slowed down my purchases in the past decade as my needs are being met for longer, work provides a decent laptop, and they perform well - usually it's a hardware failure rather than poor performance that necessitates an upgrade.
Aside - you can run RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi these days, which is a good way to use a spare HDMI port on a monitor or TV.
As for when to upgrade, which was the actual question - when you get annoyed by your current system's performance enough to upgrade. However always check upgrades - poor performance can be caused by a lack of RAM or slow storage, and both are easy to fix in most laptops.
- wow, making stuff happen on the TV screen!
1991 Cambridge Z88 (first own computer)
- brilliant compact solid state machine with Pipedream office suite that I still sometimes miss. Still got it in its original packaging.
1996 Gateway 2000
- for Windows, internet and all that. Still use the plug-in speakers on current kit.
2000 Packard Bell laptop
- because computers only seem to be good for 5 years, and there's no need to fill a room with bulky equipment your'e going to chuck out in another 5 years.
2005 Philips Freevents laptop
- pleased to get back to something as compact as the Z88
2015 Macbook Air
- pleased to get back to solid state with no noise.
2017: MacBook Air again.
More capacity this time and Retina display. The first one would probably have run out of space by now.
2020 Mac Mini
- bought the last one in stock at John Lewis Oxford Street for working at home in that week London evacuated itself before lockdown. The previous switch from Windows inadvertently meant that I was quick to have easy access to work stuff at home.
That makes 8 in 24 years. 3-4 years each is a bit rubbish. We must be able to do better tech than that! Same for phones.
Then the school BBC B
Then the school Acorns
Around this time I was helping eldest son with his research, he had the most up-to-date Microsoft which kept crashing. Introduced him to Macs
Then various Macs, including the original iMac,
Various MacBooks
now MacBook Air
Except for one of the MacBooks (which was stolen), I still have them all.
1) BBC Micro Model B bought about 1982. Used mostly for games.
2) BBC Master 128 – games again, and some fun typing in a program to draw the Mandelbrot fractals on a nice colour monitor.
3) Compaq 286 bought second-hand in about 1991 for £1000! Used for learning about PCs.
It had a tape drive which took a few days to backup the whole hard disc. Originally it ran a version of DOS, but I added Windows 3.11.
It had an external 75baud modem for accessing data held on various scientific and news databases.
4) Compaq 386 bought at computer auction in about 2000 to use to send and receive faxes.
5) ‘Emily’ (original hardware bought in 1995 as main machine, server to a network around the house. Was useful for learning a bit about Win NT and networking) Cost as much as a small car, including Windows NT software.
6) ‘Delia’ - a Dell used from about 1998 onwards for dial-up access to CompuServe Classic, now ended. Then used for games that need old version of Windows.
7) ‘Atlas’ used in various forms since about 2001 for dial-up access to new paid-for email account (which is still my main email address). Lent to a friend It failed - suspect that processor may have cooked, because one of us disconnected its fan!
8) ‘Minnie’ used in 1999-2001 by lodgers for their work, now sits above boiler (not a good place).
9) HP laptop (bought from cousin in about 2008). Used for broadband internet connection.
10) Siemens desktop. Used just for burning CDs and DVDs, no internet connection
11) Compaq DeskPro - Computer which a colleague left with me for a software upgrade, but said later he didn't need, & I could have in return for helping his girlfriend with some other PC problem.
12) ‘eMachine’ - Based on an eMachines case I bought at boot fair around 2011. Everything changed except optical drives. This machine originally had the Windows 7 I bought bundled with a processor chip, and is still running (in a different case) with Ubuntu as the operating system.
13) ‘Neccy’ - actually made by NEC. I used it to run firewall software until the bespoke power supply died.
14) ‘Atom’ - Samsung netbook bought new in 2012. It had Windows 7 Starter edition installed. Since upgraded to Windows 10 and still running (slowly).
15) ‘Nippy’ - Samsung laptop for my daughter. Lasted from 2014 to this year when an intermittent fault appeared. She bought herself a replacement.
Oddly enough both the first personal computer I used, a very low serial number Apple II in 1977, and the first computer I bough, a prototype MacPlus from work, are now worth very serious money. No idea where the Apple II is now but I gave the MacPlus to my brother and the idiot them sold it later without asking me first. As even then it was valuable. Maybe five times what he sold it for. Now multiply by at least 10 or 15. He bough some bloody Amstrad land-fill PC with the proceeds. Useless within a few years.
I think there is a moral there somewhere.
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