Comment by AStonesThrow
4 months ago
TFA is a great read, although the PS/1 being a turnkey system, the author didn't need to piece together a lot of compatible accessories to make a great system.
"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.
A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!
However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.
> However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by.
How so?
From my recollections, building a Pentium-era PC was very similar to building a PC today: case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, and storage. Most components could be upgraded independently. Granted, any meaningful upgrade of the CPU is probably going to involve the motherboard and RAM as well. That is pretty much the same as today. There were a few hiccups along the way if you wanted a smooth upgrade path, mostly with respect to the transition from PCI to AGP to PCIe for video, but that sort of thing is happening on different fronts today.
It was a slightly different story in the 486 era and earlier. There was far less I/O built onto the motherboard, but even then your computer was probably retired with the same I/O cards that it started with. The main exceptions were modems, sound cards, and some sort of controller for a CD-ROM. Yet that had more to do with online services popping up and multimedia titles becoming popular. Gamers may upgrade their sound card and a tiny fraction of people may upgrade their disk controller. So there wasn't a huge difference there. Pre-486 was slightly different since it was more common for peripherals to come with an expansion card, yet even then there were often alternatives that didn't require an expansion card.
The biggest change I can think of is the rate of progress. Performance and capabilities were exploding at a mind-boggling pace, and the only way one's wallet could cope (while keeping up) was to upgrade piecemeal. On my end, my last fresh PC build was in 2012. It has been progressively upgraded, and still has some of it's original parts. In other words, I have been upgrading that machine for 13 years, which is roughly equivalent to time-span between the introduction of the IBM PC and the introduction of the Pentium processor.
Perhaps the second biggest change is that is used to be cheaper to build. But that hasn't been true for a very long time either.
Here's our perspective. The hobbyists and enthusiasts my age (mid-50s) have reached consensus that it's not worth building a system from components anymore, for these reasons:
- More turnkey systems are available from integrators. You can now configure fully prebuilt systems direct from the vendor, or pull them off a shelf at any retail outlet. In the past, prebuilt systems were sold to grandmas and busy parents. Now integrators serve all markets from gamers, to small business, to power users as well. No user of Apple Computers is building one from scratch, and this mindset is now shared by PC users as well.
- Less tinkering. As mature power users, we prefer to "Plug and Play" rather than spending our days with the case pulled off. If we're not selecting parts and worrying about compatibility, then we can get down to using the system we have. We've learned all we need to know about the internals and earned our A+.
- Still a niche market. If you want to build from components, then you need to go into the geek's catalog market. The best/most components go directly to integrators anyway.
- Fewer distinguished components. Standard integrated Ethernet and sound and storage are "good enough" on your motherboard. At this end of Moore's Law, the buyer can load enough RAM and storage in a base system.
- More people are going mobile. We've conceded that a desktop system is overkill for our "daily driver" needs, and a notebook is really convenient when on-the-go. Notebook computers now have the power and resources to completely replace a desktop system, and every 3-5 years, you just get to replace the whole thing!
And of course, these are personal justifications and reasoning for why I don't build systems anymore. I wouldn't want to rain on others' parade. If you're a teenager and you love "LEGO For Adults" then build a system. Nobody's going to stop you. If you love PC internals and tinkering with your hardware every day, nobody's going to stop you. But as a power user with things to do every day, I need a computer that works, and a computer whose case I'm not removing every other day!
Even P2/P3/AMD K6-2 mostly had a need for a bunch of addin cards. Video, sound, NIC at a minimum. Maybe a modem or MPEG-2 decoder card or TV tuner.
Take a look at one of the best boards of the era — ASUS P2B. All of the above would be needed.