Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.