I remember buying motherboards, memory chips and the CPU and having to press them all in by hand. Then you had to fill the ISA slots with the boards to control the drives, hook up the monitor, add serial ports and add a printer, if you had enough slots on the motherboard or found multifunction I/O boards you might have enough room for a sound card. And then you had to figure out how to set all the dip switches to get it all to work together.
This morning I am struggling with my new HP laptop. I purchased a cable and rubber boot to add an additional hard drive, but it seems that HP has the latest BIOS programmed to reject any hard drive that is not on the list of original HP approved parts... reminds me of their efforts to keep people from refilling their ink cartridges. I have been looking for a work around.
I recall trying to figure out why a terminating resistor on a daisy chain of SCSI drives, which was supposed to be on the last device in the daisy chain, but often did not allow the last three devices to work, and instead, the terminating resistor only allowed the full chain to work if it was placed on the fifth or fourth or third device in a six chain series. . . or it would work correctly with no terminating resister pack at all! Sometimes, rearranging the order of the SCSI devices would solve the problem, but sometimes it made it worse. Often you had to open them up and found DIP switches with built in termination enabled with a switch setting and NO DOCUMENTATION, but that was rare. Some SCSI devices had auto-termination, but they were supposed to sense additional down line SCSI devices. I never did figure that one out. It was why IT work was often an art rather than a science.
Another one was trying to figure out how to get the switches set on a video card to get a multi sync monitors switches to work with any particular computer at the correct resolution. . . With the correct connecting cable which ALSO had a pack of switches in it (all with between four and eight DIP switches). . . And all three of them had documentation that was written by techs who had never, ever taken a course in how to write and none of them agreed on terminology. AAARRGGGH!
Then there was the placement of a chip, but one leg had to be NOT inserted, bent up so it didn’t get put in the socket. . . With the instructions requiring a jumper wire being added from the leg to another socket because the designer of the motherboard couldn’t figure out how to run a trace, to fix the problem, very carefully soldering onto the leg with a heat sink attached to prevent the internal solder from disconnecting the leg from the IC inside.