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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
Thanks for this fascinating write up. I could not afford anything better when I got into my first job, and the freedom that this mediocre box provided me was unbelievable.
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.
$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.
My first pc was an e machines… in Argentina. It’s the reason I ended in IT lol. It would never boot straight into the OS. So many random issues. I think we got it in 2001. Pentium 3 700MHz, 64mb ram, onboard video, usb, which if I forgot to disable in Device Manager before turning it off, would not boot. Aaaand windows Me, Amazing stuff. Ran better with 98.
We didn’t have internet, hooked dial up to it in 2004. No computer books either, all trial and error. Also couldn’t hire a tech to come because it was too expensive for us. My parents didn’t know shit about computers then and don’t know shit now. But hey tinkering with it got me pretty far. Sometimes I wish I was unaware of time passing as I was then and I could spend hours just clicking icons in system32
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.
41 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Now add money they were making on those mandatory dialup subscriptions and you got a money printer.
We didn’t have internet, hooked dial up to it in 2004. No computer books either, all trial and error. Also couldn’t hire a tech to come because it was too expensive for us. My parents didn’t know shit about computers then and don’t know shit now. But hey tinkering with it got me pretty far. Sometimes I wish I was unaware of time passing as I was then and I could spend hours just clicking icons in system32