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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Wow someone else from St. Louis? Found this blast from the past too: https://dfarq.homeip.net/building-a-computer-in-the-90s/

I only remembered a couple CompUSAs, Circuit City, and Best Buy selling computers growing up. I don't remember visiting any independent computer stores in the mid 90s.

But talking to those in my parents' generation, most of them bought their computers from some local small shop (and sometimes went back there for computer training!).

I count St. Louis lucky for at least having a Micro Center today, otherwise all my parts would have to come from online stores.

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I remember being quite young and my parents going to the one of the local computer shops and getting a beige box Pentium 3 at 450mhz that we used for a while. The shop put Quake on there because they had kids, and I remember the first time I played it my mom instantly went and uninstalled.

A few years later in ~2004/5 I dug that same beige computer out of the closet, bought some extra RAM (I think it was 256mb total I could fit in it) and used that to host a private Lineage 2 server, which is how I got into databases / software development in the first place. With a whole bunch of tuning I could run ~50 people concurrently on that machine without terrible lag.

Eventually I had enough people who donated that I could upgrade to a newly released Athlon x2 stuffed into a rack mount case, which I sent to a colo.

Radio Shack, the short-lived Gateway Country store, Sears had a ton of computers, regional electronics stores, JC Penny got out of it in the early 90's, Sam's Club...

I worked in one of those independent computer stores in the 90s, assembling white box PCs in a dimly lit back room, and systematically removing drivers on early Win95 machines until they'd stop crashing to identify which one was buggy.

PCs were so dynamic at the time, half my paychecks were spent on discounted upgrades before I ever saw the paper. EDO ram? sign me up. 512K of pipelined burst L2 cache? yes please. HX chipset? of course. Dual socket pentium pros? I need a raise.

Similar background re: PC building here, working at a shop that built PCs in the late 90s. I remember seeing boards with these new-fangled USB ports, DIMM memory, Pentium II, the first 3D accelerators, etc. It was a fun time. I got in to the industry right at the end of AT-style boards and power supplies and mostly missed having to deal with that stuff (other than in my personal life, where I still had old stuff).

My father just closed his local small shop, as it was no longer paying the bills. It's harder and harder to compete with the internet.

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