Comment Home-made XT (Score 1) 857
I was a poor student in 1989, but I had a friend whose father sold computer parts. So I bought off him an IBM XT motherboard (4.77MHz!), a 10MB ST412 hard drive (I still have it!), a 384K RAM expansion card, a floppy drive, and a home-made sheet-metal case. I assembled it all (my friend had to show me which way around the RAM chips went), and managed on that for a while. I upgraded a bit, of course, and built my own computer case from chipboard, appropriately varnished.