People talk about building a PC from scratch. I’ve been doing this very thing for a long time. But those who have gotten into it in recent years may not grasp how the process has changed. I’ve been meaning to dash off this post for awhile in order to illustrate how “building a PC from scratch” has evolved over time.

Mostly, this is a function of how more and more stuff has become integrated onto the motherboard. Back in the day, the motherboard was the thing that tied together a bunch of interchangeable components. Most of those components are integrated onto the motherboard these days. And that’s for a PC. More and more, computing means “devices”, i.e., all-in-1 integrated machines such as phones, tablets, and increasingly fully integrated laptops (meaning that nothing inside can be swapped or upgraded).

This also has implications for retail, notably in the case of the beloved Fry’s Electronics franchise (RIP).

Building In 1995
It was 30 years ago this semester (fall 1995) that I left home for university studies. In advance of doing so, I built my own computer. My family had a series of 3 different PCs from 1984 up until this point. As I type this, it feels strange to reflect on the “1 computer per family, at most” paradigm of yesteryear. The PCs were 8088, 286, and 486SX PCs, respectively. When I built my computer, I still remember all the individual types of parts I collected for assembly, even if I don’t remember the exact specs or brands:

• case (with PSU)
• motherboard
• CPU: 486 DX2 @ 66 MHz
• RAM: 4x1MB SIMMs, quickly upgraded to 8x1MB SIMMs when I realized that A) I could, a B) that 4 MB was starting to feel too constrained– these sticks were each US$45 at the time, so $360 for 8 total megabytes of RAM
• controller card (drives the I/O because this wasn’t a standard function of motherboards yet)
• 5.25″ floppy drive (A:)
• 3.5″ floppy drive (B:)
• 3.5″ hard drive (C:)– don’t remember how large, but was probably in the low-mid 100s of megabytes
• CD-ROM drive (D:)
• video card: no “discrete” qualifier here since all video output options were necessarily separate cards– no integrated GPUs yet
• sound card: Gravis Ultrasound MAX, which I had already purchased earlier in the year for the family computer
• modem: 14.4k would have been the standard speed at the time
• radio card: since terrestrial radio was still a thing and something I listened to, I had a radio tuner card in my PC
• keyboard
• mouse

That’s a lot of independent components to assemble. For transparency, the motherboard came with the CPU and heat sink already installed (fans weren’t really a thing yet in the 486 days). I recall that I spent about US$1200 total, not counting the GUS MAX sound card which I already owned.

Many users probably don’t remember discrete controller cards anymore. Motherboards didn’t always know how to drive storage components. Instead, it was necessary to have a separate card that knew how to talk to the floppy drives, the hard drives, and the optical drives.

I also treated myself to a brand new in box current game to flex the hardware: Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, which was delivered on 4 CD-ROMs. For you see, at the time, a game occupying many CD-ROMs was a signifier of quality… or something. Anyway, I mostly just watched the cinema scenes and never really understood the core gameplay. I would eventually revisit the discs years later and study the data formats within when I became curious about multimedia tech.

Building In 2025
Things are a bit different in $CURRENT_YEAR. Want to build a computer from scratch? It looks more like:

• case
• PSU
• motherboard
• CPU
• heat sink/fan
• RAM
• M.2 NVMe drive
• keyboard
• mouse

Those are pretty much the required parts. However, if you are building your own machine, you are likely building for gaming (or lying to yourself by claiming you’re totally gonna teach yourself AI/ML programming in order to justify a really expensive toy) and purchase a discrete GPU.

So much stuff, including storage I/O, networking, and audio (5.1 audio output and mic input) and even reasonable graphics ability are all integrated into the MB/CPU now.

Another expensive separate component which not many people owned, but which is near and dear to this blog — a video decoding ASIC — is now standard on every CPU and GPU you can possibly purchase, along with companion video encoding functions. Another component moved inside the MB/CPU block.

If you really want to customize your build, you at least have a lot of aesthetic options in:

• case
• heat sink/fan
• keyboard

Seriously, I can’t believe what a product category keyboards have become, with the customizable keys.

The Fry’s Connection
I remember hearing legends of Fry’s in the late 90s. At my first job, during the heady days of the dot-com boom, I heard dispatches from Silicon Valley from coworkers who had traveled to that center of the tech universe on business. They relayed tales of this magical retail electronics wonderland, where nerds were merrily buying cartfuls of computer gear without a second thought. I remember my first pilgrimage there in 2001. I had purchased a digital camera earlier in the summer which used CompactFlash (CF) storage. I had purchased an additional 64 MB card for $180 at the time. On the flight out to the area, I saw someone reading a newspaper that happened to have a Fry’s ad on the back page. It showed a 64 MB CF card for $45. So I made sure to visit a Fry’s during the trip so I could pick up a spare CF card– couldn’t have enough photo storage (vs. these days where its effectively unlimited on a single smartphone).

I remember thinking how serendipitous it was that I should see a Fry’s ad on the back of a newspaper. When I moved to the area a few years later, I realized that Fry’s pretty well saturated print advertising, so it wasn’t really that unusual.

All Fry’s locations were themed in unique ways. After moving to Silicon Valley, it took me years to figure out which Fry’s I had visited on the earlier trip (I wasn’t doing the driving). Turns out that it was the Campbell store, the one with the ancient Egyptian theme. It really surprises me that, for such a nerd-centric creation, there is no website that catalogs all the different store themes with plenty of pictures for posterity. I regret that I never got to visit the Burbank, California store, with its 1950s sci-fi theme.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that with the consolidation of all these various computer components onto the motherboard, combined with the continued miniaturization of high density storage (which obsoleted — or oviated the need for — many other storage technologies) meant that there was a lot less utility for such an electronics superstore. Look at the component list from 1995. What I try to impress on people is that every one of those components had at least 1/2 of an entire aisle dedicated to it in 1995:

• video cards: definitely an entire aisle as there were way more than 2 chipset manufacturers
• sound cards: Creative Labs and their Sound Blasters were still pretty dominant, but this category would still warrant at least 1/2 an aisle
• controller cards: At least half an aisle– there was a lot of diversity here as the buses were evolving quickly, from EISA, to VESA local bus, to PCI
• floppy and optical drives: many options here, but that’s not the complete story
  • at least 1/2 an aisle dedicated to floppy disks and recordable optical media
• radio card: okay, probably a single shelf of about 2 options

And so on.

Fry’s died in 2021, and I don’t recall when I had last visited, but I heard tales that the cavernous space was very sparse by the end. The above is one reason why.

Future: Nothing But Devices
In the future, it will be nothing but integrated devices.

Probably. Except for the weird nerds among us who cling to old equipment and know how to operate and repair it.