Hey, don't knock those old TI's.
First off, they were more powerful (theoretically) than the first IBM PCs. Second, they boot within a second or two of starting. I've got two of them, a TI-99/4, and a TI-99/4A. No real difference from what I can see, but the 4A has a stainless steel cover versus the plastic 4. They're far more than calculators, although I grew up using a tape recorder as a drive, because drives were way too expensive at the time. I've also got a Casio something or other, and it does look like a calculator (although huge, with no readout). All three still work. I wouldn't part with the TI-99/4A because it's a sentimental thing (I wrote my first program, a drawing program with a joystick), but the other two I'd be happy to sell for millions of dollars each.
As for regularly used computers, the worst I have is an old pentium 75 laptop. It's battery is dead, and I'd love to use it for a boat anchor, but it's got just enough life in it to make me feel guilty. It's a floppy-based typewriter, basically. There's also a 386 that's taking up space in my kitchen for no other reason than the concept that one day I'd get around to trying to install a mini-386 distro onto it and it's 425 meg drive.
The others are 233's. I've got two of them up and running on an constant basis. Why? Because it costs me nothing. They use less power than newer equipment, the parts and pieces are virtually free (tell someone you're running a 233 nowadays and they'll start offering you their old stuff out of pity--I've got the ram and drives maxed out from this), and I know what I'm dealing with when there is a problem, because I've been there before.
These aren't my main systems, but sadly, even the 233's with Mandrake 9.1 perform better in most situations than my friend's P4 XP boxes. (Configuration sucks though...can Mandrake and SuSE make their config software drag it's butt any more??!) That's just a "do stuff" speed comparison. Flexibility and interoperability (I.e., when that friend's girlfriend's Mac fuzzed on her, we didn't use the XP box to recover her info) are the "killer apps" IMHO.
