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.
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.
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.
They were ok for the price... I think they were probably the most responsible for squeezing every bit of profitability from independent builders though. It really became a race to the bottom, combined with more interest in mobile/laptop computers.
I remember in the mid to late 90's, you could build a computer for someone and walk away with enough for an upgraded system for yourself. Of course the churn on performance was very real. IIRC, 1992 maxed out with a 486 DX2 @66mhz. Around 2000 we crossed the 1ghz mark from both Intel and AMD. We went from OG Doom that couldn't cut it full screen, to Half Life and Quake 3 Arena on Voodoo 3 and early NVidia cards.
Around 2000 I remember building myself new PCs every time someone wanted a gaming PC; I'd sell them my existing system and build myself the new hotness. I'd always buy just where the price/performance curve was starting to go vertical, so the 2-3 month old machine was still quite a good "deal".
That stopped being effective sometime before 2010. Instead I'd recommend buying a decent enough machine and sticking a graphics card in it.
Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower).
4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months.
I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.
I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable).
Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era.
Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!
I have an eMachines-branded PS/2 keyboard within easy reach, which I rescued when a colleague was throwing out an old PC. It's only a rubber dome board, but it's one of the best feeling rubber dome boards I've ever encountered!
10 years ago, a non-technical friend gifted me an eMachines tower that no one bought from his uncle's estate sale. I loaded with ubuntu server, racked it up and ran a business off of it, storing some backups, generating 500+ daily customer-requested database reports, and generally kept the CPU busy running batch jobs, builds in docker, etc. I kept it running on a UPS for years until the hard drive errors force the kernel to mount it r/o. I might have kept it going, but I had a replacement on standby.
It's replacement is another cast-off, uses less electricity and is much more capable, despite not qualifying to run windows 11.
Are you paying for the dial up service? If not, gosh, you seem to be out of luck.
(Fresh out of college while the dot-com crash was still in effect, I briefly took a job for a local phone company. Their primary income was from people who were still paying 1996-ish prices for T1 lines, of hundreds and hundreds a month. Meanwhile I would go home to my cable modem which was about 4 times faster for ~$50/month. Now, techically, the T1s were dedicated bandwidth and of course my cable modem was shared, but it was still a terrible deal for them. And they weren't even getting subsidized computers out of it!)
I still remember dropping the MX440 I spent all summer saving for into my eMachine AGP slot and playing BF1942 for the first time as a total revelation. Must have been how the previous generation felt when Doom came out. Simpler times.
This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable. The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not switch!) to glue everything together.
Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days for Amazon anyway.
FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.
They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold.
Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro Center is the last one standing.
Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.
A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.
I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.
Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD. I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album, briefly mentioned in Hackers (1995): "All great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol overdose before September of 1995 (when Hackers was released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.
I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.
They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.
My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...
$99 never obsolete offer was very clever considering they probably had access to longer Intel roadmap. Starting with 1998 Intel was releasing Celerons with cheapest one always around $100. Even the earliest "never obsolete" systems could be upgraded to 766 MHz Cpu, with later 810 up to $103 1100 MHz.
Now add money they were making on those mandatory dialup subscriptions and you got a money printer.
The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.
My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers.
I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.
I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.
Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.
I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.
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.
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.
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.
They were ok for the price... I think they were probably the most responsible for squeezing every bit of profitability from independent builders though. It really became a race to the bottom, combined with more interest in mobile/laptop computers.
I remember in the mid to late 90's, you could build a computer for someone and walk away with enough for an upgraded system for yourself. Of course the churn on performance was very real. IIRC, 1992 maxed out with a 486 DX2 @66mhz. Around 2000 we crossed the 1ghz mark from both Intel and AMD. We went from OG Doom that couldn't cut it full screen, to Half Life and Quake 3 Arena on Voodoo 3 and early NVidia cards.
Around 2000 I remember building myself new PCs every time someone wanted a gaming PC; I'd sell them my existing system and build myself the new hotness. I'd always buy just where the price/performance curve was starting to go vertical, so the 2-3 month old machine was still quite a good "deal".
That stopped being effective sometime before 2010. Instead I'd recommend buying a decent enough machine and sticking a graphics card in it.
Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower).
4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months.
I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.
I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable).
Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era.
Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!
I have an eMachines-branded PS/2 keyboard within easy reach, which I rescued when a colleague was throwing out an old PC. It's only a rubber dome board, but it's one of the best feeling rubber dome boards I've ever encountered!
10 years ago, a non-technical friend gifted me an eMachines tower that no one bought from his uncle's estate sale. I loaded with ubuntu server, racked it up and ran a business off of it, storing some backups, generating 500+ daily customer-requested database reports, and generally kept the CPU busy running batch jobs, builds in docker, etc. I kept it running on a UPS for years until the hard drive errors force the kernel to mount it r/o. I might have kept it going, but I had a replacement on standby.
It's replacement is another cast-off, uses less electricity and is much more capable, despite not qualifying to run windows 11.
In 1998 I was using a P166MMX with 64MB of RAM that I had bought in 1995 for my Master's.
It makes much more sense to me to be cheap on the CPU and splurge on RAM.
So I don't see why I would want to upgrade that CPU and keep the 32MB of RAM.
So if they're never obsolete because you can always get a $99 replacement, where should I send my 486 to trade it for a Ryzen 7?
Are you paying for the dial up service? If not, gosh, you seem to be out of luck.
(Fresh out of college while the dot-com crash was still in effect, I briefly took a job for a local phone company. Their primary income was from people who were still paying 1996-ish prices for T1 lines, of hundreds and hundreds a month. Meanwhile I would go home to my cable modem which was about 4 times faster for ~$50/month. Now, techically, the T1s were dedicated bandwidth and of course my cable modem was shared, but it was still a terrible deal for them. And they weren't even getting subsidized computers out of it!)
I still remember dropping the MX440 I spent all summer saving for into my eMachine AGP slot and playing BF1942 for the first time as a total revelation. Must have been how the previous generation felt when Doom came out. Simpler times.
This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable. The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not switch!) to glue everything together.
Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days for Amazon anyway.
FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.
Dave's site has an article on Fry's: https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-frys-electronics/
They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold.
Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro Center is the last one standing.
Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.
A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.
I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.
Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD. I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album, briefly mentioned in Hackers (1995): "All great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol overdose before September of 1995 (when Hackers was released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.
She still listens to it when working.
That Fry's is forever memorialized in the 2022 movie Nope
Wow that's certainly a blast from the past. Even had one for a while.
Ahh I remember that little white desktop
I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.
They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.
My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...
$99 never obsolete offer was very clever considering they probably had access to longer Intel roadmap. Starting with 1998 Intel was releasing Celerons with cheapest one always around $100. Even the earliest "never obsolete" systems could be upgraded to 766 MHz Cpu, with later 810 up to $103 1100 MHz.
Now add money they were making on those mandatory dialup subscriptions and you got a money printer.
The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.
My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers.
I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.
I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.
Ugh, I despised dealing with that gear.
Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.
I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.