My college was another story - my major was Chemistry, but someone there fat-fingered it to add a second major in Chinese to my record. I kept getting brochures for Chinese stuff, and I knew who to blame!
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Well, this used to be the fastest computer in the school. It needs a floppy to boot up and has 128 or 256K ram, no hard drive installed.
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Not a machine that I or my family members owned, but the hard drive of this PC ( Schneider PC or EuroPC) had to be put into a parking position explicitly by specific software before it could be turned off. Which was a bit weird, because even the 8086 my father used to have pretty early on for his profession (1984 or so) didn’t required this.
For myself, as I’m a child of the early 80s…
I really spend more money that I should have on such things as a Diamond Monster3D graphics accelerator card.
And can you recall what you’ve had to pay for your Machines back in the day ?
I can recall that I’ve paid 400,- DM for my very first VGA Monitor. CRT 14,1" in 1991 or 1992. And that has been a used one from a friend of the family. Nowadays that would equate to $425.00 nowadays. My first own monitor that I had previously was a gift to me (together with a 386 DX40), only CGA.
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I love watching vintage tech videos on YouTube. This one caught my eye because it is the EXACT Gateway Essential 450 PC from 1999 I had back in the day. This was the first PC I bought for myself replacing my 1995 HP pavilion 5030 (which I received as a Christmas gift in '96). Cool video, too…
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Ah, and one more thing.
An HP Laserjet 6P. Still in use here, It’s toner cartridge is at least 15 years old. No issues, totally reliable. Definitely the oldest piece of tech I’ve got in use, almost 30 years old.
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I had somewhat similar setup. It was my first touch with the computers and although at the near end of 1990’s it was already obsolete it was first computer I used printing my one of my first home-assingments with this:
Those were the days. 
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My father-in-law had one of those, frickin’ weighted a metric ton. I can remember playing a side-scroller game where you had to jump between different levels, that is until I stepped on the 8" floppy.
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Man this thread is cool, the stories are cool/semi-relatable (I grew up in the 90s in an area that was pretty poor, a lot of our tech was outdated or broken but we always made it do something - not always useful)
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@1093i3511 Wow, the Schneider Euro PC was my dream machine back then. I’d still really like one but can’t find one for sale.
The first machine I used at school was a Research Machines RM380z (love the Zilog Z80 processor and later designed and made custom motherboards for medical applications using it. It has a shadow registry set so you can just flip to a whole set shadow registers which leads to some very interesting and clever assembly programming).
One of my first work machines that I loved was an IBM PS/2 P70 luggable which was mains powered but all folded up like a very heavy and large briefcase. The gas plasma screen was awesome.
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