The (or my?) golden age for PC building

Jay from JaysTwoCents had an impromptu chat with Steve from our local Australian Hardware Unboxed channel where they discussed a bunch of issues around modern PC building, or lack thereof thanks to the proliferation of “AI” investors and their unprofitable, all-encompassing activities. This lead them to remember what they considered the golden age for the hobby. I will never miss the opportunity to wax lyrical about old and retro computers here! This also concerns a part of my own tech history I haven’t talked much about, but am realising was just as consequential to where I sit today than anything else I did in my childhood. Those who’ve read my ramblings for a while may guess that I’d consider the 1980s to be the golden era for PC building, but that isn’t the case. First, most 8 and 16-bit machines tended to come in a box and weren’t “built”, though people were certainly building PC clones by the late 1980s and into the 90s. I also wasn’t alive for that era of computing (much to my…