My unicorn would be this:

This was my Amiga 500, with a GVP HD8+, Commodore 1010 external floppy drive and a 1084 monitor.
The only problem is, if I'd kept it, I wouldn't have been able to raise the funds for the system that came after, an AST Advantage! 486SX/33.
It was an awesome computer though. The HD8+ provided not only 120MB worth of Fast SCSI-II storage, but also 2MB of fastram.
When all my friends kept having to swap floppies over and over when playing things like The Secret of Monkey Island, I'd just have it all running off my HD.
If I could magically get back one of the systems I've owned, this would be it.

this most definitely Re: Where to get a 486 motherboard with PCI slots?

Man, there are so many good ones! I can see why you'd want to have these back. I dug up some old photos from my high school and college days. First one is what I got for my 16th birthday in Jan 1997. Compared to the 486 DX2-66 with 4 MB ram I was using previously it was a huge upgrade. This was the machine I first played Command and Conquer on, Quake, Warcraft 2, etc. It's also when I got my first email address, using a dial-up connection that was at-best 19,200 due to our crappy telephone lines. My stepdad was really laying it on thick, trying to make it sound impressive! This is one I don't have an actual picture of, but I'm adding SSTV2's from my other thread.

Second and third are my dorm room in college, (1999 and 2000) right when I moved in and then at the end of my first year. It was a K62-300 machine, with a Voodoo2 PCI, and some parts that were probably recycled from the other computer. I don't remember as much about it. I do remember that our dorms had T1 internet, which was amazing for huge matches of Quake 2. We also played Worms and a few other things. But then everyone discovered Napster, and our amazing bandwidth was hogged by hundreds of people downloading MP3s all day. Also, those sony monitor speakers were great. I wish I kept them.

Owned one of these NCR 3000 system 3434 for a while, but gave it away to a fellow microchannel enthusiast after replacing the dead power supply with a spare part from the netherlands.
Met the previous owner of the system last year on a private computer enthusiast meeting.
(picture links borrowed of wikimedia and google)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … 34_internal.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … 34_computer.JPG
https://www.recycledgoods.com/ncr-3000-system … 4-server-tower/
Apart from the microchannel bus the system features proprietary memory and SCSI boards.
The drives were 5.25 SCSI in removable trays. Mine had a memory board accepting PS/2 modules.
Probably I still have the dead PS somewhere in the cellar?
eisapc

My first PC: Commodore PC10-III
My first soundcard in that first PC: SB 1/1.5/2 (not sure which version it was in the old style box. Still looking for the last one at an affordable price HINT HINT 😉

While our family computer was an AMD K6-II, my first personal computer for my own was an AST Bravo LP 4/25s. This was around the year 2001. I'd very much like to have one again - but I'd probably find it rather dull.

I found these pictures online, sadly I have none of the actual thing.

Unicorn #1 - My Gravis Ultrasound collection which I sold for peanuts like 10 years ago. I had a GUS Max, a PnP and 2 Classic GUSes, one early board with those insane amount of capacitors and one later board with way less components. I wish ... I wish I have never sold these!

Unicorn #2 - My New Old Stock Amiga 1200 Magic Pack which I have bought from Vesalia in around 2004 or 2005 and sold a year later because I was heartbroken and felt that my life was over and the world was going to end 😁 ... Ouch 😁

My first unicorn would be the hackarific Tandy 1000 SL we had from the early 90's with this awesome sounding Miniscribe 8425F hard drive. I managed to re-acquire a 1000 SL since though, and I came up with my own unique hacks (replacing the SL motherboard with a '286-based 1000 TL board with 80287 FPU, along with the sound op-amp on said board). Currently fitted with an XT-IDE adapter driving a whistling Maxtor 7120AT. Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate a copy of Geoworks Pro to make it like the old one...

Second one, an Everex/AGI 3000G 386SX-16. Owned this waaaay back in about 1994 or 1995. The case was this huge, hulking full-AT desktop, and it had a great super-loud speaker too. The hard drive (a Priam Innerspace ID45H aka. Microscience HH-1050) went out in a blaze of glory and screeching metal, so we elected to have the system more or less totally rebuilt into a 386DX-40 based midtower. The difference in speed between a 386SX-16 and a 386DX-40 was dramatic. That system slowly evolved over time, first upgrade was an Alaris Leopard 486SLC2, next some no-name Socket 3 board that never quite worked right before a cacheless wonder Socket 3 replaced that, running a Trinity Works Powerstacker (Am5x86-133). It sat in my dad's school room doing word processing duty for about a year or two.

Third unicorn, an IBM PS/2 Model 57SLC. Got that from a friend at college, wish I NEVER got rid of it. I remember hacking up a 72-pin SIMM to upgrade the memory! I managed to acquire a 56SLC, which IIRC uses a similar motherboard and is much the same in function, but a fair bit smaller. Unfortunately it didn't come with the really strange 1/2 height 3.5" SCSI drive the 57SLC did. (That drive had a unique seek test racket too, which I have never heard from any other drive, forgot what make/model it was.)

Geez, I'm rambling like that 'Lenny' bot about my old computers. 😜