Packard Bell MMX 166MHz running Windows 95, 16MB of RAM - this was early high-school 1997/98. Overclocked it to 200MHz, upgraded RAM to 64MB, upped the memory on the graphics card to 2MB and used it for many years (Delphi literally took close to an hour to compile the project i was working on)
Years later (around 2004) when everyone was already getting close to the 2GHz mark, somebody gave me their old 800MHz PC in exchange for doing work for them (for more work later, I got an old 17" CRT monitor, my 14" CRT monitor at this point was so fuzzy that I eventually drilled a hole in the back so that I could tune the resistors in the back on a daily basis to get the picture somewhat clearer, I was also the only one able to read anything on the screen, I had to de-focus my eyes in order to read anything on the screen). I used this gift-PC to generate income with which i bought textbooks, funded my first internet and in second year varsity i could finally afford my first PC (2005) - built a monster PC with the highest spec components money could buy at the time. This was the first time i could actually run things everyone else was using, pretty soon switched to Linux and dumped windowsXP (this monster PC is now our media PC, the Stacker Case is so big that people comment that it looks like a piece of furniture itself)
After that i bought a Macbook pro - my first laptop (2011). So in my lifetime so far, I've had four computers, i bought two of them myself. Three of the four I still have and are still running fine, the 800MHz one I gave to somebody who needed a PC, I believe it's still running.
Programming came naturally for me, it was not a hard choice to make after finishing varsity. I was fairly good at it compared to other areas i could have chosen and it paid well.