My parents started a PC software ISV in the early 80s, and they bought one of the first thousand Compaq Portables in 1983 (the very first PC clones!), that they

My parents started a PC software ISV in the early 80s, and they bought one of the first thousand Compaq Portables in 1983 (the very first PC clones!), that they would take with them to trade shows. The keyboard flipped up to form a lid that covered the screen and floppy drives, but it had a design flaw in that it was more of a boot than a lid — the screen was on the bottom, and eventually the CRT was broken by a Airport porter. The next portable my dad bought was the first Thinkpad with a color screen. It had a PS/2 architecture and he ran OS/2 on it much of the time. Both computers were solid as hell. He definitely had a habit of buying insanely expensive computers and then using them forever. He had an old Dell 386 that eventually got a huge SCSI enclosure that he used as his primary machine for close to ten years (my mom had a matching one that lasted even longer). When he got a 1-meter tall dual Pentium Pro tower from Micron, he just set it up at the the other end of his 12ft desk and kept using both. He kept using that thing for another 5 years until he got a dual P4 Xeon with Rambus memory, which then lasted another 8 years (he only replaced it last year!).