@david @allison For tinkers, yes. For a normal computer user? Definitely no. Managing IRQ conflicts yourself and figuring out why DMA wasn't working wasn't fun for most. In the 486 days custom computers barely existed and building one wasn't a LEGO set like it is today. Motherboards required manual jumper settings that changed the voltage it gave to the CPU and messing that up could easily kill your CPU.

I would like to return to those times, as everything was much more hands on. One of the reasons why the generation that grew up with these computers usually knows what they were doing. Everything was later abstracted and now teenagers barely now how a computer functions.