from FB group Vintage Transistor Radios 2018-11-24
Early on, I built and upgraded many PCs when they became popular. Some for myself and friends, but most at work. Before that I was maintaining and repairing terminals and other equipment attached to mainframe computers. It started out small with TRS-80s and Apples but really took off with the IBM PCs and clones. But after many years of competitive bids with some bad experiences we finally settled on Dell PCs. The road wasn’t totally smooth, but we managed to keep hundreds of PCs running despite bubblegum and soft drinks getting into everything. It all came down to economics: It was cheaper to replace with new PCs than attempting to upgrade. Technology changed too fast. No more Ribbon cables, no more floppies to get full of dirt, most of the adapter cards came on the motherboard. Everything changed with USB. And of course there was the LAN and then the Internet. So the whole PC became less standalone and more of a system and our job was more about interconnectivity and less about maintaining and repair. It was some quite amazing changes in technology.
