When did pc building become a thing

[ZenBuilder]

So for the last few days I have been wondering when did building pcs actually become a thing that anyone could just do?

[minibois]

Just now, ZenBuilder said:

So for the last few days I have been wondering when did building pcs actually become a thing that anyone could just do?

Depends on what level you mean.

I would say DIY PC's as we know them today, started in the mid-90's, with the introduction of the ATX standard. Before that, you would still largely get "<certain brand> compatible"-products.

[ZenBuilder]

9 minutes ago, minibois said:

Depends on what level you mean.

I would say DIY PC's as we know them today, started in the mid-90's, with the introduction of the ATX standard. Before that, you would still largely get "<certain brand> compatible"-products.

But was it normal back then to build a pc like in the times of today?

[minibois]

1 minute ago, ZenBuilder said:

But was it normal back then to build a pc like in the times of today?

I think it's fair to mention I have been into PC building since about 2013 and don't have a lot of first hand experience in the mid-90's or even early 2000's DIY PC building.

What I can say however, is that DIY PC's definitely were a thing since the mid 90's, but it definitely  was a more niche thing, compared to the HP's and DELL PC's of the world.

 

It certainly isn't as glamorous as it is today, by which I mean it was mostly done out of necessity, to get the right sort of build for the user and not "for fun" as it is done nowadays (as really, a pre-built would work fine for most people too).

[tim0901]

9 minutes ago, ZenBuilder said:

But was it normal back then to build a pc like in the times of today?

My understanding is the DIY PC market is more popular today than it ever has been, but that's probably because building a PC is easier today than it ever has been.

 

Even with the introduction of the ATX standard there was still plenty of incompatability between components on the software side of things, plus with the entire population just generally being less technologically informed than they are today, building a PC was a far more daunting prospect than it is today. Hell, just the idea that it's possible to build your own pc is alien to many people today, let alone back in the 90s.

[ZenBuilder]

13 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

 just the idea that it's possible to build your own pc is alien to many people today.

it was to me a few months ago

[cole0622]

31 minutes ago, ZenBuilder said:

it was to me a few months ago

I think in the mid-late 70s people built their own computers like this one http://www.mycpu.eu/    later ICs like intels 8080 and 8085 processors made it very easy to build one. that is where the pc really became a pc the apple II ran off of the 8080 or 8085  if I remember correctly. people have even built computers out of relays, search relay computer on you tube.

[Ravendarat]

I would say in the mid 90s it was far more common to upgrade prebuilts as opposed to building from the ground up. I would tend to say towards the late 90s to early 00s is when it started to get more and more common and it just kept building from there. I dont think its ever been more popular than it is today though

[NineEyeRon]

PC building was a thing from the very beginning as the first affordable home PCs were often supplied in kit form.

 

The mid/late 90s is when the modern PC building scene started with the standardisation of consumer motherboard formats, see above posts.

[Member of PC master race]

Because Amiga OS

[unsorted]

6 hours ago, ZenBuilder said:

So for the last few days I have been wondering when did building pcs actually become a thing that anyone could just do?

I've heard stories of IRQ hell and DOS. I was not building PCs then, but I am led to believe that it all became far easier after Windows 95 was released. Heck, if I could do it then (with just an interest in PCs & no formal training), anyone could.

 

I often refer to PC-building as a type of glorified Lego - you just put the pieces together. Assembling RC cars from kits makes PC-building look like a pre-school activity for toddlers.

 

What's changed today? RGB is everywhere. Transparent Windows are everywhere. Cases made of thinner sheet metal are everywhere (don't lean on them or they'll bend or get a dimple). Beige is dead    Colour-coding all but gone. Black painted internals are seen inside cases, instead of unpainted. Plastic drive bays are common. Black on black and black-on-grey mainboard colour schemes have bizarrely taken over. I won't go into what I think of today's fashions, because some colourful language might come out...

 

Hah.

 

 

 

 

[XWAUForceflow]

Mid '90s sounds about right. I think then it started to become more mainstream at least. Though one has to consider that PCs at that time where nowhere near as mainstream as they are today. Many households at that time didn't have a PC at all and where not really thinking about getting one. So while in pure numbers the DIY community was much smaller I am not sure if it wasn't actually bigger in terms of relative numbers.

I do say that it was much, much harder to DIY though. You couldn't just hop on the internet and look what a good deal was or what was and what wasn't compatible. Even just finding out what was available wasn't easy at times. It was also the golden time for Computer Stores... Man I loved going to those as a teen and check out what I could do to get the latest out of my rig.

Still remember the times where I had a different DOS boot profile for pretty much every game I had. (Does it need the mouse, do you need the CD Rom drive, will I use my joystick?) And the IRQ hell was not only a DOS issue but could also be a problem in windows.

 

Ah the good old times (Not really, the build I did early this year was SO much easier to do...)

[Man]

Probably right around when IBM PC Compatibles became a thing, which set things for the ATX standard and consequently kick-started custom PC building or perhaps the glorious "PC Master Race"!

[Mark Kaine]

9 hours ago, minibois said:

I think it's fair to mention I have been into PC building since about 2013 and don't have a lot of first hand experience in the mid-90's or even early 2000's DIY PC building.

What I can say however, is that DIY PC's definitely were a thing since the mid 90's, but it definitely  was a more niche thing, compared to the HP's and DELL PC's of the world.

 

It certainly isn't as glamorous as it is today, by which I mean it was mostly done out of necessity, to get the right sort of build for the user and not "for fun" as it is done nowadays (as really, a pre-built would work fine for most people too).

Pretty sure it started mid 90s with the rise of "graphic cards". 

 

I had a pentium 1 pc (prebuilt of course) and I didn't know until years later there were graphic cards... and I didn't understand it either because my games ran just fine *without* a graphics card... 

 

 

But yes I think that's when it started and early 2000 it was completely normal that you could buy various pc parts and build your own... which I still didn't do because buying a HP / Acer / etc prebuilt and just slapping in a gpu and some ram was so much easier and did the same tbh... 

 

But nowadays it's actually cheaper to build your own which I'm not sure was the case back then as I seem to remember parts were expensive and prebuilts rather cheap. 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, XWAUForceflow said:

Though one has to consider that PCs at that time where nowhere near as mainstream as they are today.

Thats true but everyone and their dog had an Amiga or the cheap variant, an Atari... at least here... 

[RoseLuck462]

For me it was way back with the Apple 2

[Aragorn-]

i think for enthusiasts it goes right back to literally the beginnings of the computer.

 

The PC as we know it appeared in the early 80's, but i think those were very much business machines, and while clones and such did appear, they werent really "home" computers. Not least because they were seriously expensive.

Most 80's home computers were things like the Atari ST, Amiga 500, Commodore 64 etc, a pre-built box that was a bit like consoles these days. A sort of closed ecosystem but with some cross platform games and programs.

 

I think the 90's are probably when things started to shift and the PC became more of a "home computer". My parents had a business and had a few old PC's for business use (i remember "programming" on their IBM 5162 and later an Amstrad 286) in the early 90's, but in around '95 we got our first actual home PC. A Packard Bell Executive complete with a CD-Rom drive! PC building at that point clearly existed, but it was still very much the remit of enthusiasts.

 

Towards the end of the 90's we had a good few computer stores in town selling parts and built my first PC's as a young teenager.

 

[dilpickle]

PC building has existed for as long as PCs have. It started as a hobby industry. The very first PC was the Altair 8800 which was a DIY kit you had to build yourself. And if you actually wanted to do anything with it you had to buy add-on cards.

 

The Apple I was just a circuit board that you had to provide your own case for.

 

The first IBM-PC in 1981 was built with off-the-shelf parts. It didn't take long for clones to appear and then anyone could build one themselves.

 

If you are specifically talking about the modern ATX standard then that was 1995. But people were building their own PCs LONG before that. I have many friends who have been building their own PCs since the 80s.

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, ZenBuilder said:

So for the last few days I have been wondering when did building pcs actually become a thing that anyone could just do?

Since inception. Look up the Apple I. If you look at electronics magazines between 1975 and 1986, many computers were sold as "kits", not complete systems. the Intel 8085, MOS 6502, 5.25" floppy drive, and such are all 1976. Microsoft basic was also 1976.

 

In 1977, Radio Shack (Tandy), Commodore and Apple all started selling complete computers. 

 

So back in 1976-1977, if you wanted to build your own computer you were probably going to have to repurpose a TV if you didn't have a computer monitor. You might also need to build a case.

 

The point in time that it actually became possible to build a white-box computer was with the 80286. There was a published book "How to Build an 80286 and Save a Bundle", with a follow up with the 386 (1988), I had both of these books. Basically what enabled people to build a whitebox computer was the ability to buy replacement parts new. 

 

Fundamentally, it did start by repurposing IBM XT/AT cases, as "AT" was the first standard platform. ATX (with the Pentium II/III/4) is from 1995 or so. So the exact point that it became possible to build a whitebox system entirely from retail parts would be 1995. Up to that point between 1988 and 1995, not a lot of things were standard in a PC. Like 386's didn't have Super I/O/hdd/floppy controllers, 486's started putting that on the MB, but video was in PCIe and VLB.

 

With ATX, everything started having standard sizes and no more trying to force cards into chassis that were off by 1/8th of an inch. (However with recent, this year, video cards now taking 3-slots, that's actually hitting a point that we're overdue for a new MB design that starts putting the M2 drives on the back side of the board.

[weeblord]

22 hours ago, minibois said:

I think it's fair to mention I have been into PC building since about 2013 and don't have a lot of first hand experience in the mid-90's or even early 2000's DIY PC building.

What I can say however, is that DIY PC's definitely were a thing since the mid 90's, but it definitely  was a more niche thing, compared to the HP's and DELL PC's of the world.

 

It certainly isn't as glamorous as it is today, by which I mean it was mostly done out of necessity, to get the right sort of build for the user and not "for fun" as it is done nowadays (as really, a pre-built would work fine for most people too).

Do you think that PC building is on the decline, or will it become a "household activity"? Many people today seem less and less interested in getting their hands dirty with the insides of their computers, but as the same time a lot of my friends are converting.

[Mark Kaine]

58 minutes ago, weeblord said:

Do you think that PC building is on the decline, or will it become a "household activity"? Many people today seem less and less interested in getting their hands dirty with the insides of their computers, but as the same time a lot of my friends are converting.

I mean "Lego style self built pcs" are only interesting for a certain target audience, like gamers, "enthusiasts" and maybe certain parts of industry... the rest will get prebuilts and maybe change out some things to fit their specific needs... it's just a lot more convenient and you don't have to think about compatibility and stuff... even from the people around me those who play on pc, basically half of them buys prebuilts, usually Alienware, the Sheldon Cooper force is strong with them...  (they usually also have no idea how a computer works and are also "enthusiastic console gamers"...) 

 

I get the mindset tho, they just want a box that just works, and better than consoles so certain prebuilt brands make a lot of sense (if money is of no concern) 

[Sors]

Back on 1987 I build my frist PC from parts that my dad had laying around, it was pretty easy to build the machines back then too. We had less cables to deal with for the PSU, everything was either Molex or the Motherboard connector.

 

The real pain back then was to set the IRQ and DMA addresses right because all cards had different jumper pins you had to move to change the configuration, but the user manuals usually were lost and without internet if the card itself did not had printed how the pins should go, you had to move one and restart then run a program to check what had changed.  I remember the first time I installed a sound card took hours to make it work because of that.

 

My mind was blown the time I read about the new Plug&Play feature of win 95, and then the first year the pins on the add on cards got worst because you had to now select between the old configurations and an extra pin to enable Plug&Play with the few systems that did supported that feature.

[Dastardly740]

I did my first CPU, MB, RAM upgrade of my white box PC I bought for college in 1993 from a 386 to a 486DX. Back then the way I got parts was at a computer show at the Pomona fairgrounds.

[Gohardgrandpa]

I've been doing it since 2007. I found out I could get a computer the way I want it and at what I want to spend verse buying junk in a store