Some of the machines I've worked with:
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This is the 1976 version of the COSMAC ELF computer, built as described in Popular Electronics magazine. It featured a COSMAC 1802 microprocessor, an amazing chip with only 5,000 transistors (modern CPUs have almost a million times that many). A beautiful design, with 16x16 bit programmer-configurable registers, which greatly reduced the load on memory traffic (it had only 256 Bytes of RAM). The ELF II (1978) was my first ‘real’ computer (keypad, video, expansion bus, tape storage), which I used to learn hexadecimal math, interfacing, and early computational thinking.
I liked the Radio Shack Color Computer for AI. First released in 1980, with several newer models over the following years. It featured a Motorola 6809 microprocessor, which was an 8-bit CPU that looked like 16-bit to the programmer. This chip presented a nice, linear, orthogonal space, ideal for AI languages. Powerful addressing modes and a relatively coherent instruction set made for smooth sailing in FORTH, my preferred language. The Extended BASIC was one of the best of its time as well. Unbelievably cheap and powerful machine.
Another was the MOS KIM-1 single board computer. It featured a 6502 microprocessor, the same chip in the Commodore PET, Apple II, and many others. This was the machine that ran MICROCHESS - in 1976!
When the Palm™ computer arrived in the 1990s, truly portable AI development became possible. One example was the picoXpert story.