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).
Lisa had an early capacitance keyboard sensitive to EMF. Our building was next to an AM radio station transmitter and talking or music resulted in a steam of ghost characters when you held your hand over it. For demoing the machine I had a ground wire running to an elbow rest and chair bottom. To type comfortably with no ghost I had to have a bare foot resting on the chair legs.
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.
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.
Purchasing decisions in business and government were more ad-hoc - I can remember selling and servicing a small number of PCs to embassies, even federal government offices buying 1-5 units. Now they'd buy standard off the shelf boxes in huge quantities.
I just can't imagine now, a foreign embassy calling in to their local PC shop for service, and having a local 17 year old walk in to service a diplomat's PC.
Nothing sucked more than buying RAM in the wrong DIMM pin size. Was it 72, or 30 pin? Crap, let’s count them… This AGP card requires its own AGP slot, what? And IDE cables that couldn’t daisy chain. Man, those were the days. Cathode ray tube radiation straight to the retinas.
I worked at a shop that made it into the early 2000's doing "white box" PCs. The margins were gone by about 2002. They started sourcing PCs from a white box builder in a larger metro area who was buying in larger quantity and could still get margin, but that only lasted for a couple of years.
They went service-only a couple years after that and just resold Dell PCs, making a pittance on the PC, and doing authorized warranty work, printer service, etc, alongside "managed services" schlock.
I bailed before this and started doing contract sysadmin w/ two partners. We didn't fall for the hardware resale gambit and we're able to survive Customers going long on receivables and cash flow crunches.
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.
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.
Not sure how it was in the 90's, if it was harder it was probably because the case designs were much worse, but I think PC building is not at its easiest today either and was probably easier in the mid 2000s or 2010's (but, of course, it's still fun!):
-Graphics cards and CPUs are more power hungry, e.g. there's more fire risk from GPU power connectors now
-Graphics cards are also heavier so physical strain and location/orientation matter, some even come with a "card holder" (a little pillar to support its weight)
-There now exists "RAM training" (which can make the first bootup look as if it's failing) and in general compatibility between RAM's max speed and CPUs seems less guaranteed
-I also think RAM memory is a bit more sensitive to be plugged in perfectly in its slots now
-Storage drives now need to be screwed into the motherboard (in sometimes hard to reach places like under the huge CPU cooler) and possibly need heat sinks
-PCI lanes amount feels more limiting now than it used to (multiple storage drives and GPU fighting for bandwidth on the motherboard, limitations like "if you put an nvme drive here and here, then that will be disabled..."), it seems devices outgrew what even top end consumer CPU's have to offer
MasterScrat•4h ago