WOW. I graduated up to an old IBM XT clone after the Atari. I gutted it, and installed a x386 board, different power supply, 4 1MB, 20 pin SIMMS, and a 20 MB, 5.25” hard drive and controller card, serial card for the mouse, 16 bit color video card, and a 9600 baud USR external modem. Wedged it all in there with pieces of Styrofoam. Wires were hanging out of places where there shouldn’t have been, I’ll tell you that. Jammed a 3.5” floppy into where the old 5.25” was, got an IT friend at work to give me a set of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 floppies, and with a couple of days of tinkering, I was the terror of every BBS in my area code. LOL
HEATHKITS!!! Wow, I LOVED Heathkit projects. I didn’t get any myself (because I was a girl :-P) but my brother was very generous in letting me help build the ones he got gifted. A lot of my interest in technology came out of those happy hours building and using Heathkits.