In high school, I worked at a local PC store in Ottawa - Dantek Computers, 1994-1996. Prior to leaving for University in August 1996, I built myself a Pentium 120, with the Asus P55T2P4 motherboard mentioned in the article.
The way our store worked, every PC was built to order - we had inexpensive cases with sharp edges, we had higher end ones as well. I assembled a TON of PCs over those two years. We had a PC configuration app the owner had built in QBasic - it was very much like pcpartpicker.com , with all the parts we had available.
We played with a bunch of hardware and were familiar with it, we'd walk customers through the decisions - the impact of increasing cache, the differences in video cards. I believed it at the time, and in retrospect, still believe that it was an awesome shop - I can remember, by policy, we would sell customers printers if they really wanted one, but always recommended they buy one at the big box shop down the street, as we couldn't match their pricing. I loved that job.
markus_zhang · 19m ago
Since they were so honest I guess they didn’t last long /s
Apreche · 17m ago
Building a PC in the 90s wasn’t much different than now. Sure, you had to use ribbon cables instead of SATA cables and M2. Also had to deal with ISA slots and later on PCI/AGP slots instead of PCI-X.
The biggest difference was the shopping. Finding what you wanted from various vendors in computer shopper magazine instead of the ease of online shopping we have now.
Computer networking was new (to me) and I remember picking up an ethernet card for maybe $10. Plugged it in and boom, the magic of creating your own network.
sokoloff · 2h ago
In the mid-90s, I remember computers being expensive enough that the game company I worked at offered 0% interest, payroll deduction loans to help employees buy them. Submitting a spreadsheet of parts I intended to use got me the loan money and then payroll took it back around 1% per paycheck for almost two years.
That’s unthinkable to me now given how good and cheap they’ve become. I paid a little under $2K for a P5-90 based system (just over $4K in today’s money).
glimshe · 4m ago
Cool story - as you may also know, 4K isn't that much compared to 80s prices. The Apple II cost close to 7K in today's dollars. The Apple Lisa would set you back 35K in today's dollars.
orthoxerox · 1h ago
I remeber when my dad retired from building computers in the late nineties. We were installing a new part (I think it was a Voodoo card) (well, he was, I was in the "watch and learn" phase), he connected everything back to the PSU, turned the power on and the magic smoke escaped.
That was the moment when he hung up his hat and told me I was in charge of the home PC now.
He found the problem by the following morning, actually: he plugged the FDD molex connector back in with too much force at an angle and shorted two pins. But he would never look inside the case again.
ghaff · 1h ago
It was really easy to fry/break stuff with a lot of the big old parallel connectors especially if you were fiddling around under a desk. I switched to Macs about 15 years ago and, other than repurposing an old Windows homebuild for Linux at one point (for reasons that became largely irrelevant), I pretty much got away from doing that sort of thing.
gwbas1c · 1h ago
Where I lived there were regular fairs where different vendors would set up tables and sell parts and complete computers. They were quite fun even if you didn't buy anything.
ghaff · 1h ago
I'm sure there were others but I think is was Ken Gordon computer fairs around where I lived. As I recall, they became less interesting over time as scavenging parts from used equipment became less of a thing and there were increasingly other sources for components, shareware/freeware, and so forth.
CalRobert · 1h ago
Stop! Don’t pay retail for your computer needs! Come to the computer show and sale at…
jleyank · 1h ago
VA Linux. I do software not hardware and I could handle prebuilt stuff.
FounderBurr · 2h ago
What an absolute hell scape of a site. There were 4 video ads playing over each other at one point.
jjbinx007 · 1h ago
Looks really clean and nice with an ad blocker
MasterScrat · 3h ago
This looks interesting, but at least on mobile, it’s riddled with too many ads to be readable.
The way our store worked, every PC was built to order - we had inexpensive cases with sharp edges, we had higher end ones as well. I assembled a TON of PCs over those two years. We had a PC configuration app the owner had built in QBasic - it was very much like pcpartpicker.com , with all the parts we had available.
We played with a bunch of hardware and were familiar with it, we'd walk customers through the decisions - the impact of increasing cache, the differences in video cards. I believed it at the time, and in retrospect, still believe that it was an awesome shop - I can remember, by policy, we would sell customers printers if they really wanted one, but always recommended they buy one at the big box shop down the street, as we couldn't match their pricing. I loved that job.
The biggest difference was the shopping. Finding what you wanted from various vendors in computer shopper magazine instead of the ease of online shopping we have now.
Computer networking was new (to me) and I remember picking up an ethernet card for maybe $10. Plugged it in and boom, the magic of creating your own network.
That’s unthinkable to me now given how good and cheap they’ve become. I paid a little under $2K for a P5-90 based system (just over $4K in today’s money).
That was the moment when he hung up his hat and told me I was in charge of the home PC now.
He found the problem by the following morning, actually: he plugged the FDD molex connector back in with too much force at an angle and shorted two pins. But he would never look inside the case again.