The TRS-80 Model I with 4 KB and a cassette deck was my first computer. I will always have a love for it. I don't have a real one anymore, but I do maintain this emulator page. A lot of the code was written by Peter Phillips and I thank him so much for it. I attached the virtual keyboard, all the programs, and the ability to store programs.
My Dad subscribed to Popular Electronics and I remember seeing the first computer that I thought I could own one day on the cover. It was the MITS ALTAIR 8800 released around 1974. It had beautiful LED lights and flip switches, that's it. I never learned to program one, but because of emulation I just might spend some time on it one day.
Here's a Model III emulator I don't maintain. I like its support for lower/upper case and the inclusion of some programs I haven't been able to get working on my site yet.
JTandy RetroLandia.netMy second computer was a Tandy Color Computer 3. I wrote my first chess program on it in BASIC and used every bit of memory. I had a lot of fun on the thing and wrote several papers on it during college and printed on a Tandy DMP-105 dot matrix printer.
JS Mocha - The HTML5 CoCo 2 EmulatorOn a lark I bought a Timex Sinclair since they were so cheap. I bought a 64k expansion for it and fought through the weird keyboard and random resets because of the expansion connector. It's fun trying to do something on this emulator because the Timex worked so differently from what I was used to.
My last non-PC purchase in college which I used for the vast amount of paper writing and dial-up to the schools mainframes (at 300 baud) was a Tandy Model 100.
The IBM-PC was a very important platform for me. I used it for many years before Windows existed.
Many years ago I wanted a TI-99/4a. I bought several off Ebay a couple of years ago and put them together to make one good one. Then I decided that I needed the space so I gave it away. I knew that I could always run an emulator. It is still amazing to me that you can run an emulator for many of my old favorite computers in Javascript.