(In later versions the user added a mouse and a music player.)

So why do people do it? One Reddit user says that "the basic answer is because we can, and the resources exist to do it." It's a challenge, to push the tools available to their absolute limit.

"People build all sorts of crazy useless things in the game. It's all about thinking about making something out of nothing," says stupidjesse. "It's the fact that we can pride ourselves in knowing we made something awesome."

These constructions are typically distributed online for free when complete. The community that has subsequently evolved helps inspire would-be creators, and inspires them to build ever-more advanced constructions. Long tutorials are also available for beginners.

After unlocking it using a (customisable!) passcode, there's 20 functional apps available – spread out over multiple home screens.

Skip to the 0:40 second mark to get a look at the guts of the machine.

(There's no control blocks either: It's all manually constructed.)

(Here's a link to the download.)

He's also the perfect example of what drives people to build these virtual computing projects. Though he could save real data on the hard drive, he "didn't have anything in mind that I wanted to store on it," he told WIRED.

"I just built it for the sake of the challenge."

(For reference, you can buy a 1 terabyte hard drive on Amazon for $59.99 — 1 billion times the size.)

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