From about age 8 to around age 18 or so, I collected comic books. This was supplemented by fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from around age 12.
In my twenties I got into audio and midi gear which got me to get an Atari ST as part of the collection I was amassing piece by piece. Through the ST, I got to know about its arch rival, the Amiga. I got few hours a week in a music studio in the late 1980s that had an Amiga 500 running music apps. They were mediocre compared to those for the ST but the color graphics were much much better. I wanted an Amiga. I got one a few years later in 1993--an A2500 with a load of software. By that time I had a good collection of MIDI gear and the A2500 was the oddball that I played around with primitive digital photography with thanks to a Digiview Gold and the black and white survellance camera that they bundled with it along with a copy stand designed for film camaras. With the copy stand, it was the first scanner I ever owned as well. I subscribed to Amiga World which was filled with ads for expensive Amiga gear. There was much I wanted but little I could afford at the time.
20 years later, I was at the point of selling my A2500 which I hadn't used in years and was starting to have problems. I checked what they sold for on Ebay and instead of selling it, I bought a couple of A2000 video Toasters which I played around with and I ended up taking the motherboard out of one and putting it into my ailing A2500 which fixed it. I sold the other one and bought a lot of boards that I could never afford in the 90s like a 2320 flicker fixer, a DKB Megachip and a DKB 2632 memory board for the 2630 and Spectrum EGS which turned my A2500 into the equivelent of an A3000 in it's specs minus the Zorro III slots. I still have all the software I had in the 90s on it plus quite a bit more. I bought an A4000 video toaster after I sold the A2000 Toaster and started putting more and more into it. I first added an RTG card, a Merlin first, then a Picasso II. Last year I replaced the Picasso II with a cybervision 64. I put in a Fastlane Z3, more for the memory than the SCSI but I ended up using the SCSI for a Zip drive which made tranferring files to my Thinkpad laptop easy. I then won a Highflyer case and rechassied my A4000 with an extended busboad and a lot more Zorro and ISA slots. I added a Kitchen Sync dual TBC which made the Toaster a lot more useful. The Fastlane's SCSI started to go when I had it in the Highflyer case and I started looking for a CPU card with memory and SCSI but they are so expensive these days, it took a while to find one but I ended up getting a Phase 5 Cyberstorm PPC almost as a gift from another old Amigan and now am in the elite of 68060/PPC Amigans. I only own 2 Amigas but the real collection is inside the chassis.
Apart from the Amigas, the only other vintage computers in the collection are an Atari Mega 4 ST and a Mega 4 STE. Both run Notator--maybe the best MIDI sequencer ever--as their main function. I could also put a Thinkpad 770X from 1998 in this collection and I run DOS applications in MSDOS on it dual booting with Windows 2000.
In my collection of gear, there is a notable amount of Motorala 68000 based stuff. I have 3 MIDI boxes with the 68000 as the CPU. The Atari STs are both 68000, the A2500 has its original 68030 accellerator and the A4000 a 68060. I also have a Palm M505 which is the last Palm Pilot with a Dragonball processor which was the last hurrah of the 68000 proccessor family. I had a bunch of Palm PDAs a few years ago but I've only kept the ones with a color display.
