This Tesseract project is such an interesting study in what it takes to build a computer from scratch.<p>I think Amigas occupy such a cool middle ground between eminently <i>discoverable</i> - one can learn how <i>everything</i> works in them - while at the same time, with a heap of extra RAM and a faster CPU - you can run an almost modern <i>desktop</i> <i>environment</i> on them, including development environment.