In only a few years, the task of building your own computer has gone through remarkable changes, almost entirely for the good. Its less complicated, and far less prone to the devilish sort of problems presented by certain steps in the process.

One of the most notable improvements has to do with the motherboard. Once, all of those different ports you see on the back of your computer had to be connected to the motherboard by ribbon cables. None of them were "hard wired". Often, this great mass of cables had to be plugged into a cluster of ports on the motherboard that were all jammed together right beside the power supply. I called this "wrestling the squid". It took extreme dexterity to get the last one or two cables in place.

Building a computer required a lot more circuit cards back then. You had to have either an IDE or SCSI I/O card as controller for the hard drive, floppy, and printer port. You had to have a sound card, modem, network card, capture card, in short, a card for about everything you wanted to do.

Your video card could be upgraded by adding RAM chips to the card itself!

The toughest problem was loading the operating system. This was a multi-step task. First, you booted up from a MS-DOS floppy, and installed its files on your hard drive. It enabled you to load the driver for the CD-ROM. Then, with the CD-ROM going, you could install Windows.

The trouble was that the driver programs supplied by the CD-ROM manufacturers were very flaky. Often, they either wouldnt load, or went haywire shortly after installation. Without the driver, there was no CD-ROM, without the CD, no Windows. (Unless you had the set of 10 floppies that Windows was distributed on for a while, but thats another story.)