I built my first PC in '85, of necessity. Before that I had a Color Computer, totally useless thing with 4K of RAM and only a cassette for storage. The parts (including two 360K floppy drives and a full 640 KB of RAM) cost over $700, not including my monitor (16 shades of glorious amber!) Buying a computer pre-assembled, even a no-name clone, would have added another $300 at least. Assembling it was a challenge, since the rock bottom parts I bought (except for the Teac drives) had little or no instructions, there was no Internet for the general public, the small town I lived nearest had no book store, and no one I knew used or owned a computer, much less built one. Everything used jumpers, or DIP switches if you were really lucky. Even the little IBM trick of splitting & twisting the floppy drive cable hadn't become standard. So I really had to dive in and figure out what everything did.
Eventually I added a hard drive (20 MB formatted to 30 MB using an RLL card, which necessitated reformatting every few months), then a multiscanning color monitor and CGA video card, then I built an AT clone. At each step I had to learn the new stuff, but it definitely got easier. (If you can set jumpers on a floppy drive, you can set them on a hard drive.)
Around '90 the company I worked for bought computers and AutoCAD for the engineering department. The initial computers were Compaq, using $1,500 to $2,500 video cards, but as we added computers we couldn't afford to buy new computers and the original tech guy left so I got to build and upgrade clones instead. I fondly remember perusing inch-thick Computer Shopper magazines in search of new parts and new places to buy them. Now it's all about the Egg, and the premium for assembling new computers is so small that it's usually not worth the trouble, but I still build a couple a year.
It's been a long, strange trip but I wouldn't have it any other way.