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Olivetti 286

Having happily avoided buying one of those ubiquitous PC Clones for many years, thanks to the Amiga being so far ahead of its time, a requirement for conformity made me buckle. Amiga floppies can't be read in anything other than Amiga's, and schools started to want to receive materials on a disk not paper. And that disk had to be written on by an IBM Clone. Off to auction it was, to buy a bankrupt stock.

This was the first time I'd ever been at an auction. There was a room full of the items for sale, where you could go to inspect them. Having researched a little beforehand, a spec was drawn up for a 286, and there were two of these at the auction. When the first came under the hammer, there was a lot of interest, and before long I had been outbid. Then the second one came, and for some weird reason most of the people interested in the first one were not bidding anymore, so I got an absolute bargain. Plus the thrill of it! Twice!

This computer still works. It runs DOS 2 or something, and some early windowing program. The reason the keyboard is not with it is because this is still my keyboard now. It is one of the best keyboards I've ever typed on, and even after nearly 20 years of daily abuse it is still in perfect working order. When a spazzy lodger kicked it off the sofa and broke one of the function keys off it I nearly killed him, but luckily repair was possible (though arduous).