You always learn something new about your parents.
The other day my dad related that he had been a “motor head” back in the ’50s. Hard to believe that he and some of his friends had scrounged an old car from the junk yard and souped it up to make a hot rod. And to make it cooler they did it in California! I never imagined. 1950’s, in California, and hot rods. Wow!
But back to the post in question, I suppose that everyone has their little hobbies or passions whether it be cars, boats, cooking, gardening, or in my case, computers.
I went through the phase about a decade ago. I peeked through websites, magazines, and talked to people and decided to build my own computer. You could of course custom order a machine from a website but it’s not really the same.
Manufacturers have to make deals for the most cost effective parts, they have profit margins to consider but most of all they’re designing for the masses. Designs that are too skewed in one direction won’t sell so they limit the customization choices.
I picked out a case, the motherboard, a CPU, the power supply, the cables, and then put in the video card, hard drive, DVD drive, and LAN card.
I downloaded a BIOS off the net, and tinkered for days. Gave up a couple of times, restarted, got some advice but in about 2 weeks it was up and running.
It was no world beater and really had no huge advantage over other machines. So why make it? I can’t say really. Maybe it’s the artistic yearning to express myself made manifest? It was a decent machine that ran for about three years. Finally ended up donating it. Sadly I came back to that charity shop and found that they had scrapped it for parts since it wasn’t a name brand.
I may do it once again or maybe not. Mainly I did it that one time for the feeling that I could do it.
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