I did build an 8088 based PC from scrounged components but that was some time after the 8088 had peaked so it's possibly cheating to mention that, at that time I had an Epson PC-AX (10MHz 80286, 640KB, 40MB), man the PC-AX was enviable.

My fond memories though lie with my Commodore PC-10 (4.77MHz 8088, 256KB, dual 360KB FDD). To upgrade this to 512KB (I'm not talking about cache RAM here ) it required 9x256k-bit DRAM ICs soldered in along with a replacement PAL IC. A subsequent upgrade to 640KB was greeted by comments from my boss like "What are you going to do with all that memory?". Answer, a RAMDrive of course!!

The PC-10, which was bought from work for £150 as a returned unit, shipped with a 12" Green (monochrome / MDA) monitor. The next upgrade was the installation of a CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) card (320x200) and re-engineering the mono monitor to work in grayscale (greenscale?) mode. The MDA display couldn't display bitmap graphics but the CGA could - this was an enviable upgrade and I ended up doing a lot of monitor bodges for others since colour CRTs were about 3x more expensive than mono ones. I could stop playing Planetfall and could now play MS flight Simulator (from a self-boot floppy), wow, PCs were cool!

We had an ST-506 interface 10MB 5.25" hard drive at work, it was an evaluation model that the supplier had forgotten about. After a lot of pleading, my boss let me take the drive plus an 8-bit ISA controller home on long term loan. To put things in perspective, the OS (MS DOS 2.11) lived on a 5.25" 360KB FDD with space to spare. The OS and my programs could now live on one (hard) drive and the bootup speed was so fast it had to be seen to be believed. Don't ask me the transfer bitrate of the ST-506 interface drives now, I'm sure it's well documented though, I do know that nowadays you could write a 1.44MB floppy faster byte for byte.

I sold the Commodore PC-10 a few years later for £100 (66%) more than I paid for it, the Epson PC-AX is currently in my attic with a £500 (i386/20) motherboard bodged into the chassis.

Nostalgia? It ain't what it used to be.