Ok, practical. An oscilloscope that can probe a high speed bus like PCIe is priced in the same range as a house. Not to mention motherboards are 8-10 layer PCBs

Ok, practical. An oscilloscope that can probe a high speed bus like PCIe is priced in the same range as a house. Not to mention motherboards are 8-10 layer PCBs, which makes it pretty tough. The high level of integration is also going to make it rather difficult to get inside a lot of the parts and listen in, much less the sheer amount of stuff one person would have to know to understand what is going on from the bottom up is a lot more unreasonable than it is on a relatively primitive machine (architecture wise) like the Alto.