Building a Computer in the 90s (2019)

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).

What an absolute hell scape of a site. There were 4 video ads playing over each other at one point.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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

Plug and Pray

This looks interesting, but at least on mobile, it’s riddled with too many ads to be readable.

The same process worked in the 80s. I build a 386-25 PC from parts in 1987.

90's me was poring over TigerDirect[0] catalogs like they were porn.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TigerDirect

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 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.

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.

VA Linux. I do software not hardware and I could handle prebuilt stuff.

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.

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.