What was(is) your best computer?

Emotionally for me it was the A1000.

Its usually the current one, so this one is my best ;)

Best as in fondest memories = Spectrum, followed by Amiga 1200, and then C64.

My Amiga A500. Many, many happy hours playing Kick Off 2, BloodWych, Parasol Stars, Rick Dangerous 2, TV Sports Football, et al.

Yeah, for me I think it was my A500. I have a hard time choosing between that and my spectrum, but the Amiga for me perfectly bridged that gap between 'very little is possible' and 'everything is possible'. Seeing and interacting with primitive 3D shapes was for me as a teenager more magical than the near photo-realism of today's games, even if I'm just as impressed or more so with today's games. It's the same principle, I imagine, as loving Star Wars so much because I was a child when I experienced it for the first time. I wonder if I would love them as much if I watched them now as an adult. Watching the prequels is a good indicator...

emotionally - My Amiga 1200, 10MBytes of RAM, and hours in BBasic. Games wise... Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix was revolutionary.

My A1200. It had 6MB RAM and a whopping 120MB hard drive.

I had an A500 first which was such a great platform but really once the A1200 came along and was transferred to a tower with an accelerator, extra ram, bigger harddrive, 24-bit graphics etc it really became my favorite platform. Just a pity that many A500 games would not work on it. I am now on an Intel iMac and still getting used to it, I'm sure it will become favorite at some point, but against the Amiga it has a lot to match up to.

Ah Geoff Crammond and his wonderful The Sentinel but i also enjoyed Pete Cooke's Tower of Babel.

I'm also still more impressed by old computers vector graphics (filled or lined ones) than todays eye candy.

Sometimes it would be nice having back a solid "looks and works the same on every computer" system back. Something like a Mini2 could have some nice borders although i know that it wouldn't be a good idea for all the different needs which exist today. Ahh anyway... ;O)

yeah, I'd a 500 and graduated to the 1200. The 1200 was a very capable machine. (;-)

A500 withouth a doubt, I done a lot of programming on computers like the vic20, Spectrum etc but it was the Amiga that really got me into programming, AMOS, AMOS3D, Blitz (I used to be all excited when I would receive a BUM in the post).
Like MrTricks said, it was a magical feeling.

A500+ without a doubt as well. AMOS Pro got me back into messing about with programming and F1GP, Sensi-Soccer, Cannon Fodder , ChampMan, Monkey Island etc were played to death.
I found it in the loft a couple of years back and it booted from it's attached HD OK.
Wings was on there and I got caught up playing it again.
Still superb.

C64 for longevity

AMIGA 500 for the favorite

Actually this is really Hard...

Spec 48K - my first so ultra important
C64, just rocked I loved it.
Amiga 500 - wow a whole new league
A1200 - spent my late teens on this baby, coding in Assembly and Blitz Basic 2!
My first PC: 486 DX4 100 which I played doom on.

I can't choose, sorry...

I'm split between the C64 and the Acorn RiscPC for the best computer. Both were lovely to program and both had plenty of decent games too.

A600

Galaxia

HP9845B is my absolute favourite. I still have one running and it's been 28 years since I've switched it on for the first time. :-)

Barney

A600 also

Amiga 500, i had two of this. The next was A2000, then A1200
with powerpc processor. Great times, i miss it. I was 16
and begun with a C64, now i am 48 and using a PC. Amiga
is my favourite.

A500, then A1200 because of all the good memories and ground breaking stuff the amiga was doing at a budget back then. Made it very exciting.

My current PC is by far the best puter I've ever had, Just I've grown up a lot and a lot of things computer related don't leave much of an impression on me now.

My A1200 was great. I upgraded with a 3.5" HD (1.2GB was the largest I ever fed to it), 50MHz 68030+68882 with 16MB RAM. It was a thing of beauty.

I ran a BBS off it using a USR Courier modem (the absolute Don Daddy of modems) and managed to use 11500 DTE speed without issues (most A1200's balked at this) meaning my BBS ran smooth ;)

I loved that machine. I knew it inside and out and could tell you what it was doing just by the noise it was making.

Sadly, just as I really started to grok 68k assembly, the Amiga scene died.

What shambler said at the top.

My most powerful one is running linux and is my favorite. It is a dream to use and totally lacks windows-ness.

My most sentimental was probably either my amiga or my olivetti PC1 8mhz 8086 dual 3.5" no HDD and 512MB ram w/CGA graphics (my first intel PC, sniff -we had some good times).

A500 and a A1200 :)

Also my PC's I have had through the ages from an IBM XT till now :)

Too hard to pin down a best one. Obviously the one I have now is *the best* but for best in the nostalgia sense then....

Vic20 - Because it was my first.

Amstrad CPC 6128 - Such a cool looking machine which I spent most of my time with Rainbird Art Studio and Rainbird Advanced Music System.

Amiga 500/1200 - Really got me into programming (Amos/Amos Pro) and had some fantastic games.

486sx 33 - Had 4mb of RAM and a whopping 270mb Hard Drive, woot. Loved the PC from day one. Came with Corel Draw 3, Word 3 and Visual BASIC 3. VB 3 impressed the most as there was nothing even remotely like it on the Amiga 1200. I was hooked. Not to mention the uber wow when I played Doom II.

Those were the main 4 which I would say hold the best memories. But over the years I've had a Vic20, Commodore 64, Commodore +4, Spectrum+, Sinclair QL, Atari 400, Atari 800XL, Amstrad 464, Amstrad 6128, TI-99/4a, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 and many variants of PC's.

I'm currently looking for an A1200 to buy, but my favorite computer was the Atari 130XE (1985-1987) R.I.P., had some nice programming times with Basic XE and Basic XL. Tried to make something in the Action! language and Macro Assembler but failed :(. Probably today I'd have more success... I knew some guys that programmed games on the 8-bit Atari at the time, and they could do crazy stuff. Fond memories of games from Lucasfilm, such as The Eidolon, Koronis Rift, Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer...

Amiga 1200.

Amiga 500
Later it was the A2000

my amiga 1200 emotionally, if i never got a pc i could see myself still using one.

kev

In summary so far .... the Amigas ;-)

a1200 - without a doubt - 68k assembly & blitzbasic..ahhhh the memories :p ;)

and gab - stop posting in here + make a game or summit :p

Apple 2, then A500

CPC464... cracking machine and much nostalgia. First machine I learned to program (in BASIC).

Amiga blew me away... it was like the arcade brought into your home.

A1200 was the biggest disappointment. Not really much better than my 500.

For me, the Amstrad 1640 with its wonderful GEM environment :D

Amstrad had GEM, like Atari ST??

I only had Ataris (not counting sharp pocket calculator with BASIC) and PCs. I don't judge them by their speed and capacity, but only by the genious handling at its time.

I had STF, STFM, STE, MegaSTE, but the best of them was the STFM, it had a built in TV modulator and it allowed me the first time to CONTOL TELEVISION! (other than by using a remote control) :) it was kind of my own tv channel.

My A2000

Amiga 4000. No contest.

hmmm..me thinks fireyduck was minted..a4000 indeEd :(

A1200 at the time... 14MHz, 4MB, 200MB, single speed CD-Rom.

And to put that in perspective, my current machine is a Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB, 1.2TB, Radeon X1650XT.

...Which is ~350 times the CPU power (although most likely significantly more thanks to other optimizations in CPU technology), 512 times the RAM and 6,000 times the diskspace, so in this day and age there's no way I'm switching back any time soon. :-?

I would have to say my Amiga 500; my pc is way more powerful but it doesn't have the buzz of everything being new.

For me the A500 then the A1200 ... spent a lot of time getting PD demos, soundtracker progs and modules.

Yes amstrad had the GEM environment

Current laptop. Don't quite understand the emotional attachment to a PC - it simply does its job.

Current desktop system E6600 OC at 3Ghz with 2GB RAM, 1TB HD (2x 500GB in Raid 0 and 1) and 8800GTS. The only case so far where I didn't have a lower mid range system at the date I bought / built it.

Hello.

Amiga 1200, simple as that.

Goodbye

As others have said, for emotional reason, I pick my first computer as my favorite of the ones I've ever owned. It was a Spectrum +2A. I got one when I was 6 years old and my love relationship with computers started at that same moment.

After that, I owned a couple of consoles and even played sometimes with my dad's computer (a 286 PC). Another machine that gave me a lot of sweet moments was an IBM PC Aptiva, which was a Pentium 200 Mhz with 16 MB of RAM and Windows 95. It was my first computer in a couple of years, my first contact with internet, and the first machine in which I spent hours and housr coding games (using the wonderful -by the time- DIV Games Studio).

Another machine that I have to put among my favorites is the iBook G4 in which I am currently writing this. It's now an old machine with just 256 MB of memory, but in the three years that have passed since I purchased it, I think it has been my main computer most of the time. I expect to replace it with a brand new Leopard-powered MacBook by the end of this year.

Amiga 1200 here: 2MB chip RAM - 4MB Fast Ram - 80Meg HD, oh and a 2x CD rom drive. It was the first computer to show me the future of graphics with it's 3D textured demos and games like Indy 500, and Frontier. (better stop before the tears start).

Don't get me wrong, the PC's good, but it's got no real character to it.

Yeah IBM Clones and their spawn are like cheap blended scotch made anywhere but scotland.
Amigas, BBCs, spectrums etc are your single malts :)

Yeah IBM Clones and their spawn are like cheap blended scotch.
Amigas, BBCs, spectrums and the original PCs etc are your single malts :)

- 2,4 GHz AMD dual core
- 500 GB S-ATA2 hd
- 2 GB DDR2 ram
- asus deluxe mainboard
- 256 mb, 1.3 GHz ATI shappire

Spectrum was the one that started it all.



All soft n squidgy, mmmmmm :P

heh the dead flesh keyboard, got a mint one in the cupboard.

What i've never understood is how you could enjoy a spectrum due to the bad keyboard...

Yah that keyboard was awful with bizarre key combinations.