MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 05:35:
What made you pull the trigger on whatever it was that you ended up buying back in the day, given the choices that you had, or at least knew of?
Where did you look for cases, components, peripherals, monitors or prebuilt packages and where did you buy? What spawned the interest in wanting to buy your first computer and or upgrade in the first place? What did you almost buy? Were you left satisfied? Any mistakes? Expectations and so on, all the detail you can remember regarding your decision making as well as approximate dates.
I was sadly not around for this so I can't start with my own experience. Would love to hear your experiences in their entirity though! Could make it easier to piece together if prefaced with location.
Generally, I would say that most purchases prior to the late 1990s were, well, made out of ill information.
First computer in my family was a Mac SE that my dad bought when I was 3 or 4 - I think a very computery guy he knew told him that if he wanted a computer that could make reasonable printed materials and be easy to use and not cost him his sanity, he needed a Mac, so he went down to the Apple dealer, spent a ton of money, and came home with a Mac SE with no hard drive and an ImageWriter. But I don't really know - that's just what I pieced together.
By the early 1990s, I was a big Mac guy and reader of Mac magazines. Mac world was fairly straight forward - obviously Apple would launch new machines when they did, there were third party accessories aimed at big-budget graphic designers, that was kinda it.
Ended up switching to DOS/Windows in early 1995. Bought what, with the benefit of hindsight, was a crappy machine, but I think you have to situate how things were at the time:
1) Magazines were probably the main source of information. Most glossy magazines published by IDG or Ziff-Davis were aimed at older IT professional types. So you could read a ton of articles about mail merging (it's amazing how obsessed everyone was with mail merging in the early 1990s, no one talks about it now). They had advertisements for stuff that you could order by picking up your phone and calling some number and handing over your credit card. And the magazines generally didn't talk about hardware very much, at least not in the ways to teach you what was good hardware vs bad hardware. Maybe there were one or two gaming-centric magazines but I certainly never saw them.
2) There was no Internet for practical purposes. You didn't have the Tom's Hardware and the AnandTechs reviewing things, teaching you how to build a PC, etc. You didn't have ecommerce. "Ecommerce" meant calling the people who had ads in the magazines and asking them to snail mail you their catalogue.
3) There were also free ad-funded computer newspapers. You could just grab them from boxes off the street. They had lots and lots of ads for generic white box clones from sketchy places and random parts. The type of places that you don't get a scared parent handing over $2000 to buy a generic 486DX2/66 clone from. I remember going with a friend who was buying a hard drive from one of those places in Ottawa, ON in maybe 1996 and... the seller didn't even have a store, he was just running his business out of his apartment that was overflowing with parts. Even the ones that had storefronts... eeeek... those storefronts were not friendly. But there were lots of those stores until the early 2000s - over time the survivors started selling fewer generic white box systems and more enthusiast-friendly parts, and the others went out of business.
4) Then you had the bigger stores. Some specialized stores that only did computers, some that also did TVs/consumer electronics/etc (e.g. Worst Buy, though they didn't come to Canada until the early 2000s, but there were home grown similar outfits around) or office supplies (e.g. Staples). Those were parent-friendly. Sold systems with warranties backed by big brands. But they mostly sold lousy systems from big clone OEMs (Packard Hell, AST, Compaq, etc) + IBM Aptivas. Maybe some Mac Performas too. And they loved to sell the monitor + computer bundle - a crappy, crappy CRT from the same company as the computer. They also sold tons of software including games and tons of peripherals.
5) You also had the VARs - the Apple dealers that sold Quadras and Power Macs, the Compaq dealers that sold DeskPros, etc. You found those in the yellow pages and... well, let's just say they were not really selling to families with teenage kids. This is the model that Dell would blow up by advertising computers directly everywhere... and gradually switching from phone ordering to Internet ordering.
The reality is that, basically, you went to the #4 type stores, you looked at the label with the number of megs of RAM and hard drive and the number of MHz, your parents took some comfort in the brand and the clean floors of the store, and... you hoped for the best. And a year later, when you filled up your hard drive, you realized that, oh, oops, this AST machine only has a single IDE channel rather than the standard two, so, sorry, you can't add a second hard drive without an ISA storage controller. And oh there's no indication that the BIOS supports drives bigger than 5xx megs, which was not exactly cool at a time when AST shipped the machine with a 420 megger, so if you wanted to replace the drive, hello overlay software.
And you learned over time by trial and error and then, as the Internet got mainstream, from newsgroups and web sites and whatnot. It's interesting - pretty much everybody I know started building their own computers in the early 2000s. Why in the early 2000s and not earlier? I think a combination of being old enough to not have parental anxiety issues to worry about, and the fact that the Internet told you what parts to buy, what parts not to buy, and how to put them together.