You have not hated keypunch until you drop a deck…
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C64 and BBS’ing from the early/mid-80’s until the 386 PC clone era took off. Just nothing like it before or since… immense innovation in sound, graphics, gameplay, computer art, sampling… just an amazing time.
Overall best C64 game has to be Ultima IV. The goal wasn’t to kill everything but to master the eight virtues and descend into the abyss… armed with a real cloth map and runes you had to translate. Absolutely fantasy of the highest order.
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The vast majority of my younger years was spent using the Sinclair Spectrum 48k+. I still have it (in England though)
Other than that we had the entire Atari family at one point or other, and I spent a fair bit of time on the Commodore C64 and the Amiga which I thought at the time was amazeballs.
One special computer of note that I owned was the Memotech MTX, designed at Oxford University it was special in that it had a subsystem based on a popular English kids tv show 
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/mtx/techlib/mtx/mtx_noddy.htm
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That part number seemed awfully familiar. This is why: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/MP_M/MP_M_Index.htm
I have some of those.
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe.
This is the first computer I ever owned…bought it from Service Merchandise:
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…into a muddy puddle.
I noticed the empty shell of a TRS-80 Color Computer on the table.
I was given several in unknown condition. If we were to have a class on checking out and restoring a vintage computer, I’ll offer those up as guinea pigs.
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I’m glad you brought that up since I was hoping we could do a rebuild night. If you want go a head and put one up on the calendar for the group, or I can get one on there on Monday.
Don’t forget that the Vintage Computer Committee can receive honorarium money, if you schedule the class at least ten full days in advance and select the option for honorarium… Just be sure to word the description so that it’s very clear that participants will be learning something. 
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I have most of the chips for repairing a TRS-80 Color Computer and knowledge of the system. I’v owned my first one back when I was a kid in the 80s. 
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By '89 I was an oldtimer on the C64 online scene… was planning to create a social + technology-focused group based upon game theory and creative collaboration. Something with the intimacy of BBS’es and face-to-face communication… not like Facebook World today which feels like some kind of weird corporate attention-controlling scheme by comparison (which it is).
Perhaps an idea still to come…
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I think I had a few of your demos uploaded to my board back in the day.
Sounds just like what the VCC and XM Core is all about. The current bbs we have is at bbs.dapla.net and telnet://tty.dapla.net. I suggest checking out the board, posting in the message areas and come out to the XM Core dial-in meetups. Oh and tell your friends as well.
Heh maybe… my handle was “Razor” back in the day. Uploaded a lot of games and cracks from Europe in 1987… that was a super busy year.
Hey Razor! Long time no see. Doubt you ever dialed into my wildcat board, software systems online or even defcon/norad where I was sysop aka hacker virus. but yeah I had a few of your stuff uploaded by a member or two. Good stuff too.
I assume the question is restricted to home/personal computers.
It’s hard to pick a favorite. The first computer I recall really wanting to own was an ELF, but I saved up and bought a used OSI C2-4P instead. That would have to be my pick. It had a roomy 64x32 character display, compared with the 40x25 (or smaller) displays on other popular home computers of the day. It had a cassette interface, a decent keyboard, and had already been upgraded to 8K RAM. I programmed it in straight up machine code (I did not need to look up 6502 opcodes), assembly, and BASIC. However, it was mostly a platform for learning about electronics. I favored hacking the video card (first project was character-addresable inverse video, then a 512 x 256 dot-addressable graphics, then later, swapping that out for a programmable character generator.) When I left Memphis, I left it packed up in my closet in my parents’ home, and years later retrieved it, and started to seek out and archive info on OSI systems.
However, I remember paging through BYTE and dreaming of owning an IMSAI 8080 or SOL-20 disk system. Also, ever since seeing an HP9825 at Memphis State in the late 70’s, I have been enamored of the HP workstations of the 70’s and early 80’s. They have just always been way out of my price range until that golden period after they became obsolete and before they became desirable to collectors.
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Service Merchandise rocked. It’s a shame they’re not around any more. I used to drool over their calculator selection.
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I vaguely remember them. Mostly went to CompUSA myself or Tandy. The irony is the head of sales for CompUSA lives around the corner from me and we met while he was doing uber diving.
Wow, blast from the past there! I vaguely recall going into the one we had in my hometown, but I don’t think I ever bought something from there.