VOGONS


First post, by athlon-power

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As I approach a fully completed time-accurate build (a high-end 2008 build with a Core2Quad Q9550), I am now turning my attention back to my 1999 build (the first one listed in my signature). Specifically, I am now trying to ascertain exactly how you would obtain a computer in the way that you could, in say, 2003. While I do believe that you could order a system part-by-part, somehow, it doesn't feel right. I feel that most people would've either gone for a pre-built or would've had a system builder throw the parts together and sell it like that.

My confusion revolves around a few things:

1) Was it possible to purchase all computer components like you could a 2003 build, or something similar? If so, what websites would've often been used? (I mention websites because I like to be able to get a comprehensive time-accurate price on whatever I end up building. NewEgg from 2008 has been very useful. For instance, the 2008 build I have would've costed US$1,154.94 (it's still not complete, either- it needs RAM, HDDs, and potentially a GPU). Old scans of magazines don't tend to show prices of specific hardware pieces from what I've found- so finding parts for a custom built is a fair bit more difficult.

2) Even if you could build your own, what brands were available to use in the retail market? I know some brands and types of cards were only available in OEM situations, and it's very difficult to tell if what you're buying could've been bought on a website or in a retail store. For example, I can't tell if my Creative Labs CT5823 was made specifically for an OEM situation, or if you could buy it retail. It likely was retail considering the Creative Labs name, but things get somewhat murky easily.

3) Did most people use pre-builts that you can see in magazine advertisements? This would make finding a price for a computer very easy- just look up whatever model of computer that you want on eBay, and you'll likely find it with few modifications or no modifications at all (if it's a more obscure brand, that won't hold true, but things like Compaq, Dell, or Gateway computers should be quite easy to find).

That's where I'm sitting at right now. I also will be starting a new build from ~1993 once I get the 2008 and 1999 builds completed. There is also a chance that I will convert my 1999 build into a 1998 build, which would require me to only change out the processor and video card (and replace other things that were time-accurate, even when it was still a "1999" build).

Where am I?

Reply 1 of 24, by cyclone3d

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I worked in a computer store in 1999-2000. We could get pretty much any brand of stuff and also sold both retail and OEM hardware and software.

The big distributors we purchased from were Mighty Micro and one other that I can't remember the name of. Pretty sure the name started with an S.

We dropped Mighty Micro because they would not only take months to do RMAs, but we would have to keep hounding them to actually do the RMAs. the one time they even shipped a huge order in a could giant boxes.. one was used as the bottom and one was used as a lid. A bunch of stuff on the bottom was crushed when we received it. Just a horrible company overall.

We also bought Biostar motherboards directly from Biostar.

We sold a lot of parts, but we also had our standard builds as well as did custom builds. We had custom SWS badges that were on all out builds like most independent shops did back then.

The name of the store was SWS Electronics. They are still in business and located in Tucson, AZ.

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Reply 2 of 24, by wiretap

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Back in the late 90's, I used pricewatch. https://web.archive.org/web/19990501072039/ht … pricewatch.com/ --- I could get pretty much any component I wanted that was shown in magazines, or offered in stores. Pricewatch was basically a collective that showed the lowest prices of all computer shops on the web.

Buying online was pretty easy, and I preferred it to save money. However, most B&M (brick and mortar) computer shops sometimes offered good deals on barebones systems. This is the route most people took that I knew. A lot of people were afraid to spend several hundred dollars or more on the internet back then.

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Reply 3 of 24, by dionb

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If you want to be this specific, you really should define location too. The PC market in Western Europe was totally different to the one in the former USSR, which was different again to China or Japan or the US.

Market segment makes a huge difference too. 90% of buyers everywhere and always know nothing at all about the inner working of computers and buy complete systems from somebody, be it direct from IBM/HP/Compaq, from the Dells/Gateways of this world, from a mail order supplier or from a local white-box retailer. Enthousiasts (the kind of people on this forum) do know the guts of their machines and tend to build or at least design them themseves. If you want "what most people have" though, you're buying a ready-made box because we're not most people.

Speaking for myself as enthousiast - but poor student - in Western Europe who at last upgraded from his veteran P60 in 1999, I built my beast from scratch, getting a general idea from good websites (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech and Tweakers.net here in NL), then visiting computer fairs to try to find bargains and putting all that together. What I wanted was a Celeron 300@450 with Matrox G400 (preferably Max, but no way could I afford that), a ~10GB HDD and some nice Soundblaster. What I bought was a Celeron 366 (which ran stable around 500MHz), a slocket, an AOpen AX6BC from a very disreputable shop, an old ATi Rage Pro AGP 2nd hand for almost nothing, 64MB PC100, a 13GB Maxtor and an SB64 PCI. Every single part came from a different vendor...

2) At those computer fairs you could get just about everything, even weird OEM stuff. Generally, the more reputable the shop, the more limited and up-market the parts were. Alternate.nl (still around today) had a very decent, reliable reputation and sold almost exclusively Asus at the time. My local PC shop sold Target, PC Chips, Sweex and other bottom-feeding mess, with the odd Abit or Epox board for overclockers.

3) Most people just went to shops and said "I need it for work and homework" and got flogged a complete overkill P3 with GPU when they could have made do with a K6-2 and S3 Trio for a fraction of the price.

Reply 4 of 24, by RaverX

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1. Yes, it was possible to purchase all components. I don't think there were "websites" (I think you mean online stores), almost everything was sold in retail stores.
When you say "magazines" what do you mean? Hardware magazine that made hardware reviews? They didn't had too much "advertisement pages", the revenue came for the price of the magazine, people paid to get it. And in those few pages there were very few hardware sold by huge retail stores (the only ones that could really afford that).

2.It depends on what do you understand by retail, but anyway, almost everything was available. Most product were sold in shiny boxes, but even "OEM" products were available for you to buy, you just had to ask for it and wait a few days if the store didn't had it.

3. I believe most people were indeed used prebuilts, but not always the "standard systems". Some just bought what was available in the store (for a given budget), but some bought customized (but still built by the store) systems. And some bought the components and assembled the system at home. Compaq, Dell, etc were mostly sold by big stores, small stores sold their systems.

Reply 5 of 24, by athlon-power

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cyclone3d wrote:
I worked in a computer store in 1999-2000. We could get pretty much any brand of stuff and also sold both retail and OEM hardwar […]
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I worked in a computer store in 1999-2000. We could get pretty much any brand of stuff and also sold both retail and OEM hardware and software.

The big distributors we purchased from were Mighty Micro and one other that I can't remember the name of. Pretty sure the name started with an S.

We dropped Mighty Micro because they would not only take months to do RMAs, but we would have to keep hounding them to actually do the RMAs. the one time they even shipped a huge order in a could giant boxes.. one was used as the bottom and one was used as a lid. A bunch of stuff on the bottom was crushed when we received it. Just a horrible company overall.

We also bought Biostar motherboards directly from Biostar.

We sold a lot of parts, but we also had our standard builds as well as did custom builds. We had custom SWS badges that were on all out builds like most independent shops did back then.

The name of the store was SWS Electronics. They are still in business and located in Tucson, AZ.

I'm guessing that Mighty Micro wasn't exactly a good company. The case I have has a badge that says "ImaGEN [sic] by Telrad". I'm not sure if that was ever a business or not. Another PC I have has a badge that says "epiq pc systems".

dionb wrote:

If you want to be this specific, you really should define location too. The PC market in Western Europe was totally different to the one in the former USSR, which was different again to China or Japan or the US.

I'm going for the US market. I'm approaching this from an enthusiast's perspective, rather than the average joe, but the case I have does have what I can only assume is a system builder's badge. It actually used to be a 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of ram and a 2.??GB HDD. I found that out by looking at a sticker on the back. The case itself was made circa November of 1998, basing off of the sticker stuck to the bottom of it.

wiretap wrote:

Back in the late 90's, I used pricewatch. https://web.archive.org/web/19990501072039/ht … pricewatch.com/ --- I could get pretty much any component I wanted that was shown in magazines, or offered in stores. Pricewatch was basically a collective that showed the lowest prices of all computer shops on the web.

Buying online was pretty easy, and I preferred it to save money. However, most B&M (brick and mortar) computer shops sometimes offered good deals on barebones systems. This is the route most people took that I knew. A lot of people were afraid to spend several hundred dollars or more on the internet back then.

Thanks for that link, it'll definitely help with getting rough prices on the parts I'll be using. I'm going to continue using this as a early 1999 build despite the case's DOM of November 1998.

Where am I?

Reply 6 of 24, by seanneko

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Here in Australia, it was common to buy parts from "swap meets", which was basically a market where people sold both used as well as brand new parts. Pretty much anything was available to buy. I recall buying new parts which came loose or just in an anti static bag. I imagine that many of them were probably OEM or grey market parts which weren't supposed to be sold at retail.

Reply 8 of 24, by Unknown_K

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I think I still used places like Treasure Chest Computers in the late 1990's for parts. They also sold whole systems and were popular until 2001 or so when Insight purchased them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000304153730/ht … ccomputers.com/

Around the same time websites like Pricewatch would show all the parts deals to be had from multiple venders in real time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229113457/ht … pricewatch.com/

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Reply 11 of 24, by BinaryDemon

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Back then I would wait until a computer show came to an expo center nearby, then I would go around to all the vendors and compare prices. Sometimes the best deal was piece by piece, sometimes you could get bundle discounts. Sadly the internet seems to have killed this practice (just checked the organizations webpage, still exists but lists no upcoming shows).

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Reply 12 of 24, by krcroft

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Pricewatch! Thanks to those who mentioned it by name, because all I could remember was the super-efficient blue text on white plain background, column after column filling my screen all broken down by relevant sub categories.

I bought my celeron 266 (400oc) days after its release along with all the other parts almost exclusively via pricewatch vendors, plus a bit from a local supplier (memory express, in Calagary at the time) who also had a great up to date website with competitive rates to pricewatch lows.

Reply 13 of 24, by rasz_pl

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athlon-power wrote:

I am now trying to ascertain exactly how you would obtain a computer

Which country? I can give you central Europe perspective.
Disclaimer: Worked for one of bigger local European component distributors at the time.

athlon-power wrote:

I feel that most people would've either gone for a pre-built or would've had a system builder throw the parts together and sell it like that.

There has never been a time when DIY dominated sales, so yes, most people always either bought big brands (ibm/dell/packardbell/compaq/fujitsu/gateway/hp etc), prebuilds by smaller companies (adax/optimus/vobis/maxdata/medion) or commissioned something from a small business professional.

athlon-power wrote:

what websites

1998 says "what is websites?" 😵
Seriously tho, smaller companies and independent builders got hardware directly from distributors/bulk suppliers, said distributors didnt advertise. Most didnt even let you see prices over the internet, you had to call sales rep or drive down there and get a paper printout, best you could hope would be password protected FTP with daily XLS file, even still prices were usually in range brackets and depended on your monthly turnover - making you unlikely to shop around and rather buy in bulk.
Incidental tinkerers could buy hardware in brick&mortar shops, or hit open air Computer bazaar (huge one in Warsaw/Poland). Imagine Hamvention, but twice a week every week snow/rain/holidays included. New hardware, used hardware, testing on the spot, new software, pirated software, everything computer related. Around 100-200 companies/individuals open for business. Started ~1988, ran until killed by internet around ~2014.
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~2007 more of the same, this time brand new motherboards, I spot Asus/ASRock, probably some Abit/Soltek/MSI/Gigabyte in there too
2_1030750059_421_2173_.JPG
It was a magical place of birth for some important/big computer companies, like CD Project (The Witcher/GoG) https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/history/

athlon-power wrote:

would've often been used? (I mention websites because I like to be able to get a comprehensive time-accurate price on whatever I end up building. Old scans of magazines don't tend to show prices of specific hardware pieces from what I've found- so finding parts for a custom built is a fair bit more difficult.

paper was king, every company released tons of pamphlets with detailed price listings, used to have reams of it.
one of said pamphets 2001 with per component prices, divide by 4 to get $ http://www.wykop.pl/ramka/3391835/cennik-sprz … go-z-2001-roku/

Vobis summer 1997 https://pokazywarka.pl/900c1t-2/
Vobis summer 1999 https://pokazywarka.pl/ypp9w7/
Vobis September 1999 http://www.wykop.pl/ramka/3682653/gazetka-vob … snia-1996-roku/
summary summer 1999 http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=16pf85&s=8
prebuilds summer 2000 http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=23k3ce9&s=8 http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=14nfw91&s=8

athlon-power wrote:

2) Even if you could build your own, what brands were available to use in the retail market? I know some brands and types of cards were only available in OEM situations, and it's very difficult to tell if what you're buying could've been bought on a website or in a retail store. For example, I can't tell if my Creative Labs CT5823 was made specifically for an OEM situation

isnt this particular one a Gateway oem?

athlon-power wrote:

3) Did most people use pre-builts that you can see in magazine advertisements? This would make finding a price for a computer very easy- just look up whatever model of computer that you want on eBay, and you'll likely find it with few modifications or no modifications at all (if it's a more obscure brand, that won't hold true, but things like Compaq, Dell, or Gateway computers should be quite easy to find).

yes

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Reply 15 of 24, by xjas

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You absolutely could order parts online in 1998/99, and some of us did - sites like NCIX and TigerDirect were around, and even Ebay was already popular (I registered my Ebay account in May 1998.) Also around this time, I remember the local big box electronics chain heavily touting that they'd beat "online" prices, although the conditions they stipulated were so byzantine you couldn't get them to do it in practice. I tested this when I tried to get them to beat NCIX's price on an identical Voodoo Banshee that they had in stock, but they weasled out on a hundred different technicalities even after I'd escallated to the store manager, so I just ordered it from NCIX instead. That must have been in late 1999 since the Banshee was already an 'old' card and heavily discounted, but I'd bought other stuff from them already.

(Both those chains are gone now, but NCIX lasted longer. 😜)

Other than the big box places, which in my area actually got a decent selection of stuff (retail boxed video cards, sound cards, etc.), I used to use local independent computer shops a lot, and often drove all over town to save a few bucks on whatever it was I wanted. A few of those small shops I liked are still in business AFAIK. My city way overbuilt retail space in the '80s, so there were a lot of empty storefronts that could be leased for next to nothing, which meant we also had a ton of fly-by-night hawkers who'd get a big lot of parts from god knows where, make as much money as they humanly could off it, and just disappear before the next payment was due. I remember a well-publicized arrest over these places where it turned out the guy had owned like ten of them in succession.

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Reply 16 of 24, by Caluser2000

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Local retail shops, dedicated computer outfits, online auctions, online resellers, word of mouth etc. Very much the same as today really. I'm always behind cutting edge and basically take what I can get. Not being a gamer helps. Was still sharing a 56k dailup connection with three systems at home over 10Base2 back then. Fun times.

Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2019-06-01, 16:07. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 17 of 24, by dr.ido

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For new parts back then it was either the computer swap meets already mentioned or the tiny little shops where the sellers from the swap meet operated during the week. These were usually dingy hole in the wall type places with little to no signage or advertising. There would usually be a few retail boxes parts on the shelves, but most of what was actually sold were "OEM" parts with no box. Cash only - no receipts. Obviously they were running some kind of scam and I'm sure some of them got busted, but there was always another one close by to replace them. I remember buying my AMD K6-2/450, Epox motherboard, 6.4GB quantum and my first CD-R (no W) drive from these guys.

Reply 18 of 24, by the3dfxdude

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I built computers from scratch in 98/99.

1) It was possible to purchase all the parts no problem. Online, retail, and mail-order (like computer shopper). I'm sure retail store, mail-order, existed through-out the 90s.

2) I don't understand why you want to differentiate OEM-vs-retail since I pretty much saw these as being the same, just lower cost. I know there existed wholesellers that sold OEM parts open to the public. OEM order stuff was basically the same stuff without the same retail packaging required since the packaging would just get tossed and never really mattered. Funny thing was, me buying OEM was cheaper anyway, as retail was marked up. But the other funny thing was regular people could do it too, if they just knew what to do, and likely did because this info was passed around pretty quick, and how I really got into it. This considerably lowered the price to getting a computer in the late 90s.

3) People bought machines mail-order or retail that were basically custom-built machines. But computer enthusiasts were frequently building machines from scratch during the 90s. But you also gotta remember that even in the 80s, some big computer companies got their start from ordering parts and doing out of the garage this same exact thing you are kind of talking about. While there were less people doing it all on their own, there were clones galore by the late 80s, buying off the shelf stuff. It's always been a part of the PC market from the beginning because that is exactly what IBM did.

Reply 19 of 24, by Unknown_K

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Quite a bit of the stuff you found cheapest on pricewatch (especially hard drives) were OEM leftovers being dumped not retail.

Computer Geeks was around in 1999 and I started using them heavily in 2000 or so.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980521054557/htt … w_prod_disp.asp

Snagged my 2 boxed PPro Overdrives and a PR440FX Intel motherboard from there. Got 1GB of RAM for that system from Ebay (one of the first things I purchased there).

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