I'm a few years older than you, but went through sort of the same progression of PCs. At the time, my dad ran a tax return business from home, and as a necessity through most of the 90s would upgrade his computer every couple of years.
The first computer I used was his first computer-a Tandy 1000 that he bought in the mid-80s. He had maxed it out with a full 640kb of RAM, dual floppy drives, an internal 30mb HDD, and even an internal modem(a business necessity for him to electronically file tax returns). The first computer I seriously used was his 386, passed down to me when he upgraded to a 486. The 386 too had been maxed out, with a math co-processor and 5mb(1mb in DIPPs, and the other 4mb as 4x1mb 30pin SIPPs) of RAM, a Sounblaster with an external CD-ROM drive, and a secondary internal 256mb HDD to supplement the factory 40mb. We later upgraded the RAM to a screaming 17mb by replacing the 1mb SIPPs with 4mb SIPPs.
In any case, the first computer I really seriously got into doing my own work on was an off-brand tower with a Cyrix 6x86 at 266mhz. I put a CD burner in it and had a couple of GB of disk space. My Windows 2000 experimenting was done on an AMD K6...
My first real exposure to Macs were when I was in high school. Our main computer lab had a room full of tray-loading iMac G3s, which were dated even at the time(2002-2006) and were notoriously unreliable. I
think that they had at least been upgraded to OS 9, but still would randomly freeze or shutdown for no apparent reason-we were admonished to continuously save our work-something I'm still in the habit of these days. Those did not leave me with a positive impression of Macs. My experience in Journalism class, at least, was a bit better with using Pagemaker and Quark on a B&W G3 to do the layouts for the school newspaper.
In any case, I'm glad that I've "seen the light" and have been making up for lost time
. My freshman year of college, my room mate had a new 15" Powerbook(what we now call the DLSD-HR) that I always admired. I was "plugged in" enough to know that the Intel transition was underway at the time(fall 2006) and had some discussion with him about his choice of the Powerbook over a Macbook Pro.
Having recently acquired an identical computer, I spent all of last week intentionally using it for "work stuff" and was impressed by how useable a late generation Powerbook still is. I didn't do anything too heavy duty, but put used it to put together my biweekly research presentation in Powerpoint(which also involved some pretty heavy use of Excel) and used it to give the presentation.
For the sake of comparison, I also dug out the laptop I bought for my freshman year of college-a Gateway running Windows XP(still). Although it will still boot and run, the Powerbook remains far more useable. Admittedly, though, the Gateway was $500 at the time and the Powerbook $2000. I actually quit using the Gateway in 2008 because it had become too slow to really accomplish anything on.
But, that's probably enough rambling about past computers I've used for the evening
