First contact was a PET 2001 with buildt in tape and that ridiculous chiclet keyboard and whopping 12K RAM at school - I was 16 then in 1980 and I remember they called for a dedicated school conference just to decide whether the school could afford purchasing the RAM upgrade from 2,5K to 12K which at the time was in the 1000s of DM and thus VERY expensive :-)
Then messed around with a buddy's VIC20 and my base player's ZX81 - the latter just being a terrible nightmare, sorry.
1982 I bought a C64 & 1541 and used it for MIDI controlling in my home recording setup together with the frst available MIDI interface and sequencer software by Steinberg.
https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/83843-c64-steinberg-research-midi-interface/http://www.muzines.co.uk/images_mag/articles/SOS_apr_1986_the_professi_1_large.jpgA friend of mine preferred playing Impossible Mission on the thing tho until he was able to play the damn game blindfolded and with earplugs from start to end in under 2 hours or so. :-)
Later I've got me a 1040STF in 1985 also for MIDI controlling and first C programming stuff until it got a lethal RAM upgrade by a friend who afterwards wasn't a friend any longer :-)
I then purchased my first 386 with stunning 8MB of RAM - remember a certain Bill Gates claiming that noone would ever need more then 640K of RAM, well, yeah, right... - and a ridiculously large 125MB HDD, which at that time (1990/91) was thought to be a beast of a machine - at least the seller was quite impressed as he had to order "special rare parts" for that one and I paid almost 5.000 DM - being around 4.300 € in today's money... well, given the fact that I was a poor student back then and compared to the 6.000 € for a little used cabin boat I bought three months ago, that was quite an investment, being rendered almost worhtless 4 years later... :-)
On that thing I did programming under OS/2 1.2 - 1.4 for my master thesis in CS using the Glockenspiel C++ pre compiler, the C/2 Set C compiler and ORACLE 5 as RDBMS - quite a setting as I also connected an old VT220 terminal to the serial port to use for starting the compiler and displaying error messages, while the 14" (!!!) Monitor displayed the Editor - there was no IDE at that time under OS/2 and the REXX Editor with some basic command line integration came later :-)
Those were they days and now I feel VERY old