My first computer system was the awesome Commodore VIC-20.
Purchased through an entrepreneurial gas-station owner in Custer, South Dakota,
the VIC had a nominal 5K of memory (with about 2.5K being consumed by the
operating system), a highly advanced cassette-tape-based mass-storage
system, and a high-resolution 20-line by 24-column TV set display.
In later years I enhanced the system with a homebrew expansion bus, an additional 32KB of memory, a 5.25" floppy drive, and interfaced it to an old Teletype band printer for that letter quality (but slightly smeary) output.
This system saw me through four years of college until it was supplanted by a Toshiba T1000.
It wasn't pretty, it wasn't fast, but it was the only system I've owned that could crash its OS in the middle of a term paper due that day, yet miraculously recover the text in its entirety with a pair of POKE statements.
Ultimately, I gave the VIC to some friends who had tragically lost the use of their CP/M system (albeit by not following my advice when connecting a new keyboard). In a way, I wish I'd kept it.