How far back were people talking about building up a Viet Nam era lookalike?

Wellup to the late 1980's there weren't any other uppers really available.  The forum here on AR15.com started up about 8-9 months ago, there was some well spoken interest mayeb 6 months before that.

So maybe 1 1/2 years ago in earnest as a gorup effort, otherwise it was guys just doing their own thing for qutie a few years.

1959

  I started building my own rifles in the late Seventies. Most of the guy's I worked with at that time were Viet Nam vets and they were a big help, especially the Ex-Marines,they were really ingenius about modifying the guns they were issued.
 My favorite gun was and is the XM177E2. The first one was on a Sendra lower with Colt parts that I hunted for at gun shows,gun shoppes,garage sales,surplus stores.
 Retro is a fun hobby,I also got into the history behind the design and development of the Commando. It still is interesting. The best part is some kid asks me where I got my rifle, I say, " I Made it !".  

Don't know about others, but I built my first M16 A1 clone in 1997. The purpose was to look like a new issued M16 A1 and I found that there were sources of new unissued parts out there if I looked around some. I also found that some parts were just not available at all.

I appreciate the answers so far.

The reason I ask is that I bought my first SP-1 in the mid 80's. Your local fun store usually had a few examples ready to go. I paid $300 for mine, lightly used. The things everyone was ga-ga over at the time were Steyr AUGs, Valmets, SPAS-12s, Calicos, long barreled UZIs, Strikers, and so on. After Red Dawn came out, you wanted an AK47, about the time I bought my SP-1. There were aftermarket handguards, grips, & FH for the AR15s coming out and the first time I had my SP-1 on the range, it was the sole stock dressed one there. Even though you could only have 5-rds. on the firing line, I think I was also the only one with a 20-rd. mag in the well. 30-rd. were everywhere else.

As far as building them up, the parts ads in SGN were relentless. The parts were cheap & magazines such as Firepower were doing build-ups & how to's quite often. But they weren't doing them with non-FA uppers, triangular HGs, or prong FHs. Non-FA uppers were talked about as unreliable (mostly) & you had to do FA if you were serious, just like the military. When the A2 came out, you wanted the new sights too. Certainly this could have been a regional thing and confined to New England but I'd bet not.

Anyway, that is how I remember it. I saw that the forum was not that old & figured the talk of retros must have been fairly regular in one of the other forums for awhile before it was decided that there was enough interest to warrant its own fourm. I am amazed at this forum too. I've learned more about the early history of these rifles than ever before. I'd only seen small pictures of the the Air Force survival variant with no background info & here someone is building a clone! It doesn't get any better, wicked cool.

Carry on!