[theginger]

Looking at the amount of wires going into this, my instinct is that this cannot scale, in 5-10 years this won't be doable for a Pentium chip, at least not as an at home hobby project. But I actually think it could go the other way, and in 5-10 years you'll be able to do this at home for far more sophisticated kit, unlocking crazy amounts of reverse engineering possibilities that were once thought of as near impossible, or at least only possible for a nation state scale setup.

[st_goliath]

I'm pretty sure if you really want to, you could do something like this as a hobbyist with a Pentium right now.

Instead of futzing with wires on a breadboard you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox, solder your scavenged Socket 7 onto the board.

The days of toner transfer and aquarium pumps are already long gone. Getting production quality, one-off, multi layer PCBs done as a hobbyist is dirt cheap these days, no government budgets required.

[duskwuff]

I don't know about Pentium, but there's definitely some homebrew 486 projects out there, e.g.:

https://maniek86.xyz/projects/m8sbc_486.php

[ErroneousBosh]

> you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox

It blows my mind that I can use free-as-in-beer Free-as-in-Speech software to design a PCB, email it to a dude in China, and get a finished working professional-looking PCB back in my hand within a week, for the price of a couple of coffees. And if I want the components stuck on too, it'll cost a little extra, maybe three coffees it costs now.

If I want it really quickly then for the price of a decent takeaway curry I can have it flown over next day. What the actual hell?

Edit: the slowest part of "next day" is when it hits the UK, and if I could guarantee it just gets delivered to DHL's Edinburgh depot I could drive down there in two hours.