| This makes me a little sad. I owe some of the fun and great learning experiences I had in my earlier days to Fry's. Here are some memories I have from their Austin location that started around the early 2000s - a time when I was transitioning away from being a music major and just starting to dabble in programming and pc hardware: - I had a basic Dell desktop that helped me through college. Back then, base models came with around 512 MB of RAM. It got awfully slow, and Fry's helped upgrade it to 2 GB of RAM! I was amazed at the difference that made. - I always had fun browsing their isles. During one of my first trips, I came across Linux distros they sold via CD; those introduced me to Linux nearly two decades ago. I eventually became a full-time Linux user, and have been ever since. - I bought my first mechanical keyboard from Fry's after feeling what it felt to type on display samples available on shelves. - Back when I had a DVD collection, 25%-50% of it was likely from Fry's. - I still have a PHP 4 book I bought from Fry's. It introduced me to my first PHP and Apache install. I remember the fun I had working through that book. - Eventually, the vast hardware they used to keep in stock got the better of me. An old friend made the trip with me to help me buy parts I'd need to custom-build a pc. And over pizza and beer, we built my first desktop together. It replaced my old Dell mentioned above. I've built every one of my desktops since then, some of which used hardware from Fry's. - And for a time, anytime I convinced myself I needed additional storage or a faster CPU, I immediately looked forward to going to Fry's. Those may not sound spectacular, but I think others in this thread will relate to some of them. Personally, what I valued the most, in hindsight, was having a place I could go to and physically experience or navigate paths of my growing curiosity in programming and pc hardware. The Fry's in Austin is still open, and I'm aware of it's barron nature, but even so, I might make one last trip. |