Over the years I have owned a number of vintage computers, although some of them were not vintage at the time! So this is a potted history of my personal technology including stuff I currently own.
(Photos mine except where noted).
PowerBook 145B
I sold this early-90s PowerBook some time ago, but it was a good PB while it worked properly! The caps finally went on the contrast control so the screen was sometimes usable, sometimes not.
The 145B was a second generation PowerBook 100 series, sporting a 25Mhz MC68030 but no FPU. This was typical of a lot of systems in the day, since before the 68040, the FPU was a separate chip (either a 68881 or 68882).
I eventually got it connected to the Internet via a PPP link over a serial cable (to a Raspberry Pi) but it only really worked at 9600bps with no error correction. I never figured out if that was down to the USB -> Serial adapter, or the null modem adapter, or the DB9 -> Mac serial cable. Still, it was fun to mess around with.
Amiga 500
The A500 was my first computer in the sense of it being my personal machine, not a family computer. I must have got it around 1992 or so, perhaps 1991. It was one of the odd A500s that had the “Fat Agnus” chip that supported 1MB of “Chip RAM” (graphics memory, in effect) but the 512K memory expander was still seen as “Slow RAM” – perhaps an explanation is needed here.
The Amiga architecture divides memory into (on a stock system) Chip and Fast RAM. Chip RAM is accessible by the CPU or the Amiga custom chips (graphics/sound etc) but not at the same time. The CPU has to wait for a custom chip to stop accessing the Chip RAM before it can access it. Fast RAM is CPU-only RAM which, as the name suggests, is faster for the CPU because it as unfettered access. Slow RAM was an unofficial designation for the 512K RAM expander on some A500s, which was NOT Chip RAM but was on the same bus, and so was still unaccessible to the CPU while custom chips were using the Chip RAM.
In any case, a very minor (and very irreversible!) hardware mod made that Slow RAM into proper Chip RAM, which 12 or 13 year old me duly did (without asking, of course!).
To Be Continued…