These are release dates and end-of-sales dates for computers in my collection. While release dates are relatively easy to find, end-of-sales dates prove significantly more difficult to research.
There is little, to no, information for the Compaq Portables and Sun SPARCstations with regard to their ending sales dates. If you have corrections or additional information, please let me know.
The chart shows computers currently in the collection with solid bars, and computers not yet in the collection with outline bars. The horizontal span of each bar represents the period during which that computer was actively sold.
Why So Many Machines?
For most of my career I was a software entrepreneur. I maintained a sizeable cross-platform C++ library that I purposely kept portable across as many Unix and Unix-derived systems as possible. The library documentation has more detail on the scope of that work. With so many machines available to me, I made a concerted effort to compile the library on every Unix-derived machine in my collection and recorded the compile times across all of them.
That library was the foundation for my cross-platform editor, cm (cmacs), described here with source available on GitHub. Having a practical reason to keep all of these machines running meant they were maintained and exercised regularly rather than just sitting on a shelf.