Unless I'm growing senile, the 8088 (at 4.77 MHz) was the microprocessor in the original IBM PC, which was hardly an obscure machine, as well as its successor, the PC/XT. (There was a 286-based XT later, I think.) Isn't the 8088 just an 8086 with 8-bit instead of 16-bit bus to save some money in the supporting components?

Anyway, I answered 8088 because that was in the first computer I actually bought with my own money (not a trivial expense at 12 years of age, either, but it certainly ended up being a good long-term investment). Still, for some reason I've got a real soft spot for the Z80-based CP/M systems we used in school for a while. They were actually connected via a primitive network to a centralized 10MB hard disk. Learning assembly language and tinkering with the boot loaders on those things was fun, I must admit.

        $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';