raudette 2 days ago

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.

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  • reactordev 2 days ago

    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.

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    • icedchai a day ago

      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.

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      • reactordev 13 hours ago

        It literally standardized PC desktop motherboards. What are you on?

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        • icedchai 3 hours ago

          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.

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