In only a few years, the task of building your own computer has gone straight through marvelous changes, almost entirely for the good. It's less complicated, and far less prone to the devilish sort of problems presented by sure steps in the process.
One of the most renowned improvements has to do with the motherboard. Once, all of those dissimilar ports you see on the back of your computer had to be linked to the motherboard by ribbon cables. None of them were "hard wired". Often, this great mass of cables had to be plugged into a heap of ports on the motherboard that were all jammed together right beside the power supply. I called this "wrestling the squid". It took ultimate dexterity to get the last one or two cables in place.
Scsi To USB
Building a computer required a lot more circuit cards back then. You had to have whether 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 whether wouldn't 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 that's someone else story.)
construction Computers: A Short History lessonscsi to usb cable