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Every now and then in places like Slashdot and Sektori there comes a story of computer history, and people get all nostalgic about their first machines, how everything was better with those. Even if they had to go uphill both ways in six feet of snow to manage them. Here's my brief history so I won't have to rewrite it for all those times.
Z80 and a BASIC interpreter. It's possible I'd written some BASIC earlier at school or at my friends' places with Commodore machines, but this is how I got into it more seriously. In retrospect it's nice to have had an off-mainstream machine as it didn't have all those games :) Just a Pacman derivative and a chess on EPROM modules. Interestingly, the manual was in German, which I started to study that year.
Another fun detail was the cassette drive: The computer had audio in/out connections for a regular cassette recorder. So I guess you could have used pretty much any audio storage device :)
10 MHz i80286 with 40 MB HDD and memory that ought to be enough for everyone. Came with MS-DOS 3.3 and later ran many other DOSes. After getting a Soundblaster in early 1992, all hack broke loose and I got into demogroups and other k3wl stuff. First as SSB, later as Te(ch|k)noHog.
My first Linux machine, starting with Red Hat 6.0.
This marks a point of divergence, as I started to use several different computers for 'serious' uses. Installed Gentoo on this in late 2003.