PC building in the 90's?

[Guest]

Being young and introduced sometime in these recent generations the fact that computers were internally upgrade-able, I've always been curious how this was way back, like in the 90's with DOS and Windows 95 etc.

Did this PC building/upgrading trend exist the same exact way throughout those years? I mean being able to buy every component separately and putting them together.

I'm also think it was back when not nearly as many people had internet so that makes me wonder where would they learn to put them together, and to understand the series of parts like video cards for example, and be up to date with which were current? With that, there probably were very little or none of these online stores like Newegg to buy components which is pretty much is the standard method of buying them these days, so I'm guessing there were more computer stores back then with more in stock and more customers which all together seems rare now?

A big flaw with current pre-built store computers, at least for gamers is that they didn't come with any video card which seems to be unlike the ones from back then, such as Compaq's. But were the video cards inside those older store pre builds just cheap made low end ones compared to the ones that were out there at the time like the Voodoo 3dfx series etc?

If you were some one who got into or continued PC gaming and did any build or upgrade for any part during the 90's, this would be a good place to express your story or nostalgia of it because I'd have fun hearing it since I'm very interested in how it was in those years. Tell away : )

 

[drixkarasu]

You might want to read this article if you haven't already:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/quest-for-retro-gaming-1,28918.html

Back then you had to buy components on physical stores, and you would read reviews on computer magazines if you had no Internet connection. It wasn't as convenient as it is now, but PC building was done back then too.

 

[guanyu210379]

I ain't wanting to go back to set my processor speed using switch jumpers anymore.
I also hated that we had to set master and slave jumpers on drives.
Chips (processors, RAM, etc.) really exploded if you OC them without proper cooling, the thermal protection today is way better. I fried quite a few those days.
Playing games without any HDD at all, only by using 2 5" floppies was also not fun at all.
Watching CGA pictures all the time was also bad. EGA was alright but CGA hurt my eyes. VGA with 256 colors was also not bad.
Beside playing game oldies, there is nothing good I want to repeat today. Building PCs is a lot easier today.

 

[Alain Auclair]

since the very begining clones that you could built yourself or choses parts existed but a lot less choice and less places to shop

 

[spdragoo]

Well, I can remember surfing the Internet while attending college back in the mid-1990s -- you want to talk about retro, nothing like using a VGA-equippped Windows 3.1 machine with Netscape Navigator to surf the Internet over a dial-up connection (or how "exciting" it was when modems went from 28.8kbps to 33+ kbps, & finally made it to the glorious 56Kbps), or spending hours in the university computer lab because you could take advantage of the "super-fast" T1/DS1 connection (1.544Mbps).

What I really miss about those days, though, was the wider selection. You didn't have just 2 GPU providers, you didn't have just 2 CPU providers, & most importantly at least before the Pentiums came out you could actually use non-Intel CPUs in Intel-designed motherboards, since everyone was pretty much using the same sockets.

But, then, I also don't miss the dialup days, I don't miss the "old" days when you sometimes had to buy the separate "math" chip to go with the CPU, & I especially don't miss daisy-wheel printers.

 

[thx1138v2]

I personally started building my own computers in the late 70's. I had a Radio Shack Model I and found a kit to build a RAM expansion unit for it. So I soldered it up, connected it and had double the memory - 32K lol. I later acquired a Radio Shack Model III that had a disk drive, albeit one single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk. The model I used a cassette tape for storage. I found some guys who were hackers (back then hacking meant using a hack saw to cut up circuit boards and attach that part to another circuit board to create something new) that upgraded my Model III to 2 double sided floppy drives. I didn't do that one myself.

When I started the Radio Shack and the Apple computers were about all that was commercially available. The difference was that the Apple was all proprietary but you could find the specs and schematics for the Radio Shack machine. This was before the IBM PC. IBM came kind of late to the personal computer business and their marketing genius was to publish the specifications and schematics and it contained expansion slots. With all of that knowledge public, anyone who knew electronics could build cards to go into those expansion slots and perform any function desired. In this way IBM got the whole world to develop improvements for their PC while Apple was still proprietary and would only handle parts they supplied. Apple marketing responded by giving Model IIe's to schools, thinking that if they got the kids hooked early those same kids would stick with Apple as they grew up.

But IBM was the computing company that business turned to in those days so they already had a foothold in business. That foothold and having the entire world improving their system is what made the PC explode onto the world stage.

There were Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) before the internet. You connected to them with dial up modems over phone lines. They were basically what are called forums today. Of course, they were mostly visited by geeks but there was plenty of data there to be had. And there were a lot of contacts for parts suppliers. Back then it was mostly mail order purchasing unless you lived in the same location and could pick up the parts locally. Most all of the documentation for those parts was printed so you got the documentation when you bought the part. Most of the electronics manufacturers didn't have electronic documentation and didn't have any presence on the BBS's.

Keep in mind that back in those days Windows was pretty crappy (I started looking at it when it was Windows 286 which required an 80286 processor) most monitors were text only and the processing just wasn't there to do even passable graphics. There were some highly specific applications that could do 3D wire frame graphics pretty well but they were mostly engineering applications that had a lot of assembly language coding to get the speed.

Both Windows and graphics took off with the 80386 processor and the top of the line 386's ran at 25MHz so it was still too slow for good graphics but the monitors were improving also so the whole industry kind of took off at that time.

And that kind of bring us up to your starting point - 90's and Windows 95. IBM kind of started the whole DIY thing when they made the specs and BIOS code public in the early 80's but it was pretty limited to geeks at the time.

When the monitors were text based Pong was about the only game on the PC but it kept growing and with the advent of good graphics hardware and software. 3D modeling started in the engineering side and grew into the gaming and virtual reality of today.

I can't say much about the prebuilt machines because I've been building my own for so long. Where I worked, my employers' machine were always several steps behind what I had at home so I never cracked one open to diddle with it.