Fry's Electronics - Did aliens kidnap all their merchandise?

[MineralMan]

44. I don't. I built a lot of PCs, though, back when they were

expensive to buy. I ran a PC User's group, as well, that had about 100 people at each monthly meeting. That was from 1986-1998. Once a year, we'd have a "build your own PC" gathering. People signed up and the club bought all the components from Fry's and other suppliers The people who signed up paid in advance for the cost of the components. Then, on the Build It day, a few of us supervised the assembly process, helped where needed, and did troubleshooting if any problems occurred. The first year, we built 8088 XT clones. Each year after that we built PCs from whatever the current CPU was, and whatever motherboards were available at reasonable prices. Some of our members built a new PC each year to keep up with what was going on. Toward the end, we had a checklist for each member to fill out, specifying options for their project, like RAM, hard drive size, modems, etc.

It was great fun, and people saved a pile of money by building their own computers.