Building A Computer From Individual Components

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.

- I disagree with some of the statements above. Building your own computer from components is still going strong (2010), check some of the websites offering …“a case from here, a motherboard from there, memory, modem, drives from elsewhere…”. Yes, there are people that purchase “pre-built”, but there also is a group that still builds their own from components—–especially the gaming folks who need speed.

– The above poster missed the point. We're talking about soldering IC chips, capacitors, and diodes onto PCB boards.

NOT obsolete. It's still common to design and assemble embedded computers boards (most are much more powerful than anything in the 1970's/1980's).