[frik]

The computer hardware would be a real problem. Sadly most computer architectures are guarded as a trade secrete. And even early PCs like Apple I and the one that Bill Gates wrote his first BASIC for, were using off-the-shelf CPUs. One of the last wire-based (non ICs) computers with high speed performace (~ 500 MHz) were the Cray super computers. It seems most of the details are lost in history. We should start to reverse engineer the museum pieces and write the knowledge down on paper. Probably it would also help us with current gen CPU design problems.

The software side will be easier. Knowing ASM of the available CPU architecture one could write a C, BASIC or Fortran compiler from scratch and write a operating system either by using source code from books (like Minix), etc.