And a bunch of homebrew in between. But a 6809 with 512K RAM would have been very nice :)
And a bunch of homebrew in between. But a 6809 with 512K RAM would have been very nice :)
I sorely wanted an Atari 520ST when they first came out, but it was more than I could afford at the time.
After graduating from university, I eventually got a Gateway 386 with a whopping 4MiB of RAM. In part to play Wing Commander and Castle Wolfstein. I've mostly been a PC guy since, though I've dabbled in RISC-V more recently. Not ready yet to make that my main desktop though.
The ST was my first 'serious' computer, with a massive amount of memory and an optional hard drive it really unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities, such as compiled languages and more RAM to work with, I used it for all kinds of commercial projects. In many ways X86 felt like a step back after working with the ST, especially after I figured out how to add more RAM to it. It also had a whole slew of useful ports including MIDI.
Today I use an old Thinkpad as my daily driver and it's funny, it's probably the oldest piece of hardware that I have here (a W540, 9 years old, $300 second hand including the 32G RAM in it), but it performs admirably and it uses very little power (everything on solar here so that matters a lot).
But I've been eyeing that RISC-V stuff as well and like you I'm still in hold mode. But it's getting closer.