> It wasn’t just harder or more expensive. It seemed like every new build was an adventure.
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
I generally agree. But then again, we had Master/Slave IDE connectors, floppy drives, _extremely_ shitty CPU sockets (broke plenty of Sockel A / 370 cooler latches), nothing (including keyboards and mice!) was hot-pluggable ...
Regarding your last point: that's just market segmentation. Plenty of lanes on server CPUs. Remember Linus' rant about Intels refusal to offer ECC for consumer CPUs?
everything is more expensive, more complicated, fragile, and with subtle incompatibilities.
I fully understand people wanting per-buildt, I get it, building and configuring properly a computer that will last, is not easy..
like xmp(not activated by default hu?) EXPO intel cpu and amd cpu bring significant motherboard diff? :(, ATX 3.0 or ATX 3.1 psu? with 12VHPWR or 12V-2×6 connector??? what the gpu can caught fire now???? and it's actually not new and there is no solution???? case are not so simple to choose?? wdym I have to do market timing to get a GPU at a still ludicrous price!?
In 1995, a decent entry level computer was probably at least $2k (in 1995 dollars).
Now double that to $4k in 2025 dollars to account for inflation.
Now consider that in the 90s, hardware advances were coming so quickly that such a computer would be noticeably dated within 1-2 years, very out of date in 5, and borderline useless after only 7-8 years.
Today, there are plenty of computers that cost $1k-$2k new (2025 dollars) and are still perfectly usable 10+ years later. There's really no comparison.
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.
I don't think it was so much the business practices, but the market that shifted - I think it was a viable business for most of the 90s - there were a lot of these shops, but most have disappeared. It made sense to build for a use case to save on parts, but now, the most basic PCs handle most computing tasks with ease.
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.
The birth of the ATX format made it so anyone could order parts online (with a little bit of knowledge) and it would fit. Would it be the best? Maybe not. But it fit.
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.
Not really. I remember the AT to ATX transition in 1995, and it definitely didn't fix the parts issue. Your motherboard and power supply would fit. Anything else could still be a problem.
You still had pick the right CPU, memory, and expansion cards. Early ATX motherboards had ISA, PCI, AGP. It did nothing to fix most of the parts issues. I build PCs both with older AT and ATX standards. ATX did fix the "IO card" problem, but it wasn't a panacea for all PC building.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Apple Lisa was priced way too high. We had an Apple store with one and people loved to play with it for a few minutes but at its price point no one made a connection with it. Not even people we knew to be independently wealthy and collected 'toys'.
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.
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.
I spent the last half of the 90's and the first part of the early 2000's building computers. Like the author, it started with a massively thick Computer Shopper catalog. Motherboard from TC Computers, 1.3GB Dirt Cheap Drives, 16MB of 72pin DIMMs from my dad's old Compaq. 486DX4 from some other seller. Man that was such a rush cobbling that thing together. But the bug stuck with me and eventually got me a job - which got me installing Novel, WindowsNT and eventually Linux! Then my boss sprang the big one on me, "you know, the real money is in software development". What a great trip down memory lane.
The strange thing is, if, in 1995, one were to write an article about building a computer in 1965, it would have involved a room full of gear for e.g. an IBM System/360. The rate of change has slowed.
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.
Can confirm the first time networking two computers felt like magic. Even at 10mbps (limited by the cheap hub I had) my first LAN was amazing. I networked my computer, the family computer, and an old PC as a Linux server and used diald to share the dial-up networking between everyone. It was a real honest network and was amazing at the time.
I had a friend who got a job at Compaq after we graduated college in the 90s. He said they would frequently throw out an entire palette of mostly working hardware after having used it for testing.
He was able to snag a Pentium motherboard and a SCSI controller for me, and that's how I upgraded from a 486 to a Pentium.
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.
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.
I just remember as a kid somehow always ending up with open box stuff from fry's that was clearly labeled as such and having a lot of stability issues lol.
> It wasn’t just harder or more expensive. It seemed like every new build was an adventure.
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
I generally agree. But then again, we had Master/Slave IDE connectors, floppy drives, _extremely_ shitty CPU sockets (broke plenty of Sockel A / 370 cooler latches), nothing (including keyboards and mice!) was hot-pluggable ...
Regarding your last point: that's just market segmentation. Plenty of lanes on server CPUs. Remember Linus' rant about Intels refusal to offer ECC for consumer CPUs?
everything is more expensive, more complicated, fragile, and with subtle incompatibilities.
I fully understand people wanting per-buildt, I get it, building and configuring properly a computer that will last, is not easy..
like xmp(not activated by default hu?) EXPO intel cpu and amd cpu bring significant motherboard diff? :(, ATX 3.0 or ATX 3.1 psu? with 12VHPWR or 12V-2×6 connector??? what the gpu can caught fire now???? and it's actually not new and there is no solution???? case are not so simple to choose?? wdym I have to do market timing to get a GPU at a still ludicrous price!?
> everything is more expensive
In 1995, a decent entry level computer was probably at least $2k (in 1995 dollars).
Now double that to $4k in 2025 dollars to account for inflation.
Now consider that in the 90s, hardware advances were coming so quickly that such a computer would be noticeably dated within 1-2 years, very out of date in 5, and borderline useless after only 7-8 years.
Today, there are plenty of computers that cost $1k-$2k new (2025 dollars) and are still perfectly usable 10+ years later. There's really no comparison.
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.
Since they were so honest I guess they didn’t last long /s
I don't think it was so much the business practices, but the market that shifted - I think it was a viable business for most of the 90s - there were a lot of these shops, but most have disappeared. It made sense to build for a use case to save on parts, but now, the most basic PCs handle most computing tasks with ease.
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.
The birth of the ATX format made it so anyone could order parts online (with a little bit of knowledge) and it would fit. Would it be the best? Maybe not. But it fit.
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 dont remember anything confusing about agp, iirc it was simpler than pci-e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port#Comp...
Not really. I remember the AT to ATX transition in 1995, and it definitely didn't fix the parts issue. Your motherboard and power supply would fit. Anything else could still be a problem.
It literally standardized PC desktop motherboards. What are you on?
You still had pick the right CPU, memory, and expansion cards. Early ATX motherboards had ISA, PCI, AGP. It did nothing to fix most of the parts issues. I build PCs both with older AT and ATX standards. ATX did fix the "IO card" problem, but it wasn't a panacea for all PC building.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Apple Lisa was priced way too high. We had an Apple store with one and people loved to play with it for a few minutes but at its price point no one made a connection with it. Not even people we knew to be independently wealthy and collected 'toys'.
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.
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.
I spent the last half of the 90's and the first part of the early 2000's building computers. Like the author, it started with a massively thick Computer Shopper catalog. Motherboard from TC Computers, 1.3GB Dirt Cheap Drives, 16MB of 72pin DIMMs from my dad's old Compaq. 486DX4 from some other seller. Man that was such a rush cobbling that thing together. But the bug stuck with me and eventually got me a job - which got me installing Novel, WindowsNT and eventually Linux! Then my boss sprang the big one on me, "you know, the real money is in software development". What a great trip down memory lane.
What an absolute hell scape of a site. There were 4 video ads playing over each other at one point.
Looks really clean and nice with an ad blocker
The strange thing is, if, in 1995, one were to write an article about building a computer in 1965, it would have involved a room full of gear for e.g. an IBM System/360. The rate of change has slowed.
90's me was poring over TigerDirect[0] catalogs like they were porn.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TigerDirect
I remember going to the Flea at MIT in the late 90s - (i was a mid-to-late teenager) https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/
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.
Can confirm the first time networking two computers felt like magic. Even at 10mbps (limited by the cheap hub I had) my first LAN was amazing. I networked my computer, the family computer, and an old PC as a Linux server and used diald to share the dial-up networking between everyone. It was a real honest network and was amazing at the time.
I had a friend who got a job at Compaq after we graduated college in the 90s. He said they would frequently throw out an entire palette of mostly working hardware after having used it for testing.
He was able to snag a Pentium motherboard and a SCSI controller for me, and that's how I upgraded from a 486 to a Pentium.
This looks interesting, but at least on mobile, it’s riddled with too many ads to be readable.
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.
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.
Stop! Don’t pay retail for your computer needs! Come to the computer show and sale at…
I just remember as a kid somehow always ending up with open box stuff from fry's that was clearly labeled as such and having a lot of stability issues lol.
The same process worked in the 80s. I build a 386-25 PC from parts in 1987.
VA Linux. I do software not hardware and I could handle prebuilt stuff.
Plug and Pray
[dead]