Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reactordev 295 days ago
The birth of the ATX format made it so anyone could order parts online (with a little bit of knowledge) and it would fit. Would it be the best? Maybe not. But it fit.

Nothing sucked more than buying RAM in the wrong DIMM pin size. Was it 72, or 30 pin? Crap, let’s count them… This AGP card requires its own AGP slot, what? And IDE cables that couldn’t daisy chain. Man, those were the days. Cathode ray tube radiation straight to the retinas.

2 comments

I dont remember anything confusing about agp, iirc it was simpler than pci-e
Not really. I remember the AT to ATX transition in 1995, and it definitely didn't fix the parts issue. Your motherboard and power supply would fit. Anything else could still be a problem.
It literally standardized PC desktop motherboards. What are you on?
You still had pick the right CPU, memory, and expansion cards. Early ATX motherboards had ISA, PCI, AGP. It did nothing to fix most of the parts issues. I build PCs both with older AT and ATX standards. ATX did fix the "IO card" problem, but it wasn't a panacea for all PC building.
History says otherwise