Ha! The power supply did run the entire length of the case. The PS/2 series was a trendsetter, its the one thst started the small dins for mouse and keyboard.
I used to connect to PLC's with a couple DOS monochrome "laptops". We also used proprietary units made by TI, namely the TI VPU 200 complete with a thermal printer Ah the good ol' days!
My first computer (that I actually used at home), was bought used from a small business. It was a sweet 386 DX with 16 MB RAM (huge) and an 80 MG HD, with a 20 MG secondary HD - it had DOS 6.1 (I believe) and Win 3.11 with Word Perfect and Lotus(?) for Windows. I installed Quatro Pro from work and I was styling!
First one that didn't come out of a dumpster was an Epson 80286-based machine, never did find an 80287 co-processor for it lol. Had a monochrome (Hercules type, the display was an orange on black CRT) Display and one of those clickity-clack keyboards. 5 1/4" floppy drives and a 40MB Hard Drive that sounded like an F-16 spooling on start-up. I guess the NEC PC-8500 we bought at a yard sale counts as my actual first PC. But it was so limited in capability that I have a hard time calling it a PC.
You know it's kind of funny, when you think about it. Most of us are, well to put it politely, old farts. Really, consumer computers, at least affordable (kind of), have only been around for 20 years or so, around the time of the popularising of the WWW. Kind of makes you pine for the old days of snail-mail, phone calls, having to go out to the mall to shop, actually talk to people in person...Yuck, I like it better now.
Our first computer was an Apple IIc with a dot matric printer. We paid about $2400 for it. I had it all boxed up in storage. The kids cleaned out my storage and toss it on the dump.
Now that sucks. However, truthfully, all Apple products should wind up there.... Just kidding, don't want to start an Apple versus Android war.
Not until the last 2 years did you not run into an apple phone person that to take a pic their memory was full and that hey had that hey delete pics be for they could take a new video or pictire. Haha
Had one of those too.. The dentist my wife worked for gave it to us used.. Single 5-1/4" floppy and no hard drive.. They paid $2,400.00 for it too..
Z80 processors are still used to this day as they are very good at what they do and low cost.. We have some smart engineers at work that design custom electronic boards and code software.. They are so advanced that many times the hardware can't keep pace with their software! Everything they design is measured down to milliseconds of processor time.. In a recent design they replaced the i7 processor with the latest version because the generation of i7 at the time of design couldn't keep up! They also code software using machine level language (not so much now), visual basic for the operator interface and C# .. Very impressive!
Commador 64 here It was fancy and even had a seperate floppy drive! It could change background colors too!