A donated IBM 360 in high school (1970-74). Don't remember if it had a bona-fide OS with it, but I do remember the boot loader requiring you to set set 16 DIP switches and press a "load" button, then repeat 20-30 more times. Did everything in direct machine language on IBM punch cards. No assemblers or compilers, no word processors to write the code with. Mis-type one keystroke and you get to start the card over (80 characters per card).

My first home PC was built around 1978 or so. Myself and one of the other Jr engineers took a "spare" DEC LSI 11/03 card cage home and built a small chassis for it. Had the power of the shop's DEC mainframe but in a nice small desktop package. Two 8" SS-SD floppy drives that gave around 180kB of storage each. One disc carried an abbreviated version of the RTX OS, along with a BASIC tokenizer and a FORTRAN 4 compiler. The second disk was for your application program and data storage.

Currently have a workstation at the shop using XP-Pro, and a Dell laptop at home with SUSE linux. Tried to run Umbunto on the Dell but gave up after three nights due to video issues.

Cheers, Mark