Windows Pre-Alpha 0.0001 Box (Score 1)

My first home-built PC was a CP/M (precursor to DOS, still the basis for Windows), Z80 machine with 64K of ram and 2 241K 8 inch floppies. A local University (which I was attending) had a bunch of these and I glomed onto a PC board (no mask on it) with hand drawn traces and no chips, resistors or capacitors. I soldered all of them on then spent 2 months debugging things like traces that were too close and had capacitance between them. I bought the chips, resistors and capacitors, a raw transformer, a fan (all from places like Jameco), had a custom aluminum case made at a local machine shop, added an H-19 (vt52 clone) terminal and I had the only personal computer off-campus owned by any of the CS students. It only cost me about $1700 too (a commercial version of the same box cost $4400 without the terminal).

I did my homework using Microsoft FORTRAN (back when they were just a compiler company) and really hit gold when Borland released Turbo-Pascal v1 for $29 (advertised in Microcomputer magazine).

I have much better PC's now, but still miss the heavy horsepower sound of those Siemens 8 inch floppies moving the heads when doing disk I/O.