Likely falling on the 'old' side of the spectrum of posters here, I can't help but feel quite sentimental when I see these kind of articles - and regret, once again, that I wasn't born earlier so I could a) participate in the 'when it was still fun' age of computer hardware development and b) be retired by now!
But if you would like to experiment with computer architectures, you can get something like the Altera DE-2 [1] and play around with really crazy sauce kinds of things, n-way associative cache with CAM register banks and dynamic register renaming? No problemo! And you do it all without soldering or wire-wrapping or anything. I have some PDP-8's and I love them dearly, but it is soo much easier doing stuff on an Arduino than a PDP-8/e.
I really love the pace at which computers are going; I have the latest smartphones, tablets and laptops. But I also have Spectrums, MSXs, PC1210, TRS 80(-100 and others), Amiga, ST and other bits and pieces.
It's a very different thing; I really love the fact I can do anything on something I can balance on my nose for an entire day, but fun wise I like soldering 74 series extending things. Being able to write an OS and understanding every single part of it, hardware and software.
Sure things are 'easier' now and that's a lot of fun for some things but I find it interesting and calming to leave the large amount of black box and extreme complexity in modern systems in my spare time.
Computers can do more now, but relative to expectations of the time, computers were more fun then because they were new. I had more fun with my Apple //e and later Amiga 1000 than I have ever had with an iPhone, because expectations were lower, and just moving a sprite across the screen was impressive.
Whose expectations? Yours or someone else's ? Were computers new or where you new to computers?
So I went through an interesting series of transformations, first I was amazed about everything 'computer', I built my own Z80 machine, I ran through all of the languages that the mainframe the highschool had access too, I wrote games, "operating systems", computer languages, and various diversions just for fun. All the way through to about the mid-90's when I started working on the system that would become Java. The new stuff was fun, Sun's politics were soul crushing. I lost my sense of 'wonder' about doing cool things. It took me a while, wandering in the desert to realize that I was piling up all of these negative experiences against something I loved doing (systems design). I discovered it could be way fun to bring VMS up on an old VAX and show it off, to demonstrate active/active fail-over clustering on something as 'stupid' as a proprietary SCSI bus. The reason that was fun and 'regular' computers were not (to me at least) was that regular computers represented 'work' and 'the man' but these other computers were untainted. I committed myself to re-invigorating my 'wonder' and haven't looked back since.
I had an ST rather than Amiga. So we know I'm suspect ;). But I, when I got my 3GS iPhone, kept telling folks it was my favorite computer I ever owned. Still feel that way.
Personally I don't know the difference between a chipset and a plate of chips, but even with my limited knowledge I can tell instantly that a tremendous amount of work went in to building this. Kudos to your dad.
In the early 1980s I was doing an electronic engineering apprenticeship and was tasked with wirewrapping a backplane for part of a flight simulator. It was a big panel - a stand-up job to do the work - and it took me the best part of a week to lay out and wrap all the wires and it was with great joy that I passed the panel to the electrical inspector for examination and testing.
A day or so later, back came the inspector with a grin on his face and he said "I have some good news and some bad news..."
"The good news is that your panel has passed acceptance testing" - Yay!
