[Dr. Sivana]

Her son was an aspiring rapper and a "little genius" who built his own computer.

These days that means buying a motherboard, memory, SSD and power supply, and slapping them into a box. In my youth it meant running debug on the MFM hard drive controller and low level formatting the drive, not bending the pins on the memory chips, not reversing the unkeyed power supply connector, getting all the right cards (Hercules graphics, serial, parallel, time), etc.

The serious nerds before me bought a bare Z-80 chip and built his own circuit board and typed in an OS. I helped him by typing in Teeny Basic.

[curious7]

And some of us built them using kits from Heathkit. Like the H11 (DEC LSI-11 16-bit processor). Or the paper tape reader/punch!

[Bikkuri]

Don’t forget the dip-switches.