Macintosh SE
Bought: 1987
Cost: $2,300 (with Student Discount, normally $2,900).
RAM: 1MB
CPU: 8MHz Motorola 68000
Storage: two 800 kB floppy drives

I bought my first computer just before going to grad. school in 1987. It was a dual-floppy Mac SE. I started programming by writing a Pascal program that was an N-body gravitational simulation of the solar system.

Macintosh Quadra 630
Bought: 1994
Cost: $1200 (?)
CPU: 33MHz Motorola 68040
RAM: 4 MB

My last Mac – the OS was getting ugly, and I couldn’t depend
on buying stuff that would work (MIDI interfaces, CDROMs, software).

Dell XPSR
Bought: 1998
Cost: $2,300
CPU: Intel Pentium 400MHz
Storage: SCSI 40 MB (?)

My first PC, purchased when I joined a start-up. It ran as my web-server up until 2003, first running Windows/IIS, then Windows/Apache, then Linux (RedHat 9).

Dell Dimension 8200
Bought: 2001
Cost: $2300
CPU: Intel 1.3 GHz
RAM 512 MB

This is the first PC I tried to do media on. I got an Audigy external box for the thing, plus a DVD burner. I switched this to Linux around 2005 (FC3?). I used it up until a couple of days ago.

Dell Inspiron 518
Bought: 2008
Cost: $330
CPU: Intel dual-core 2 GHz
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 250GB

My latest – significantly cheaper and quite a bit better. Fedora 9 is running nicely on it.