The first time I built a computer from scratch using TTL components was in 1978 for my senior project. I have repeated the effort a couple of times on FPGA's. If you have never tried building your own computer from scratch, you should, it is a great learning experience and also, kind of a lot of fun, I guess if you are a geek which a lot of us on HN are :)
That’s a project many generations of electrical engineering students did in the university in Dresden. It was fun and great experience and admission for final thesis. I think, it’s a must for every electrical engineer since electrical systems barely exist without software nowadays.