Building A Computer From Individual Components
| Field | Home computing |
| Went Obsolete | 1980s-2000s |
| Made Obsolete By | Cheap pre-assembled computers like the C64 |
| Knowledge Assumed | Soldering, identifying electronic components, good visual acuity and hands-on assembly skills, use of hand tools, following written instructions |
| When useful | Made early home computers more affordable |
By "building from components" I don't mean plugging a PCI card in!
My Dad, in 1979, bought his first home computer. It was a Sinclair ZX81? and he had to solder all of the components to the motherboard by hand. That included capacitors, resistors, chip sockets, TV modulator and so on. Effectively, he started with a pre-drilled and labelled PCB and a bag of bits.
Building a computer this way roughly halved the cost back then, making them much more affordable.
This topic could be generalized to "building an electronic device from a prepackaged kit".
Note that building a computer by assembling separate components - a case from here, a motherboard from there, memory, modem, drives from elsewhere, etc. - was still quite popular among geeks through the mid-2000s. After that, the sharply falling price of pre-assembled PCs? made it less and less appealing for the amount of work required.
The grand-daddy of them all was the Altair 8800, a microcomputer kit released in 1975 and sold mail-order through ads in such a Popular Electronics magazine. The kit cost was $439, about twice that with the most common add-ons. The programming language was Microsoft's first product, Altair BASIC.