Assembling of my own “supercomputers” in pictures

Introduction

This website is meant for my friends to see how I have assembled my everyday desktop computer. These machines that I call “supercomputers” are just relatively high performance home computers connected to a plethora of external peripherals. I use my PC mainly for the agile processing of photographs, running Flight Simulators, playing advanced computer games and book-editing work.

After my first ready-assembled PC, I have updated/built my PCs mostly from “boxed” components: not being a professional PC assembler, the increased cost is justified by the lovely coloured boxes, with plenty of cables, other accessories, and full instruction leaflets.

These webpages deal mainly with hardware. Most of the pictures have been taken by myself. Enjoy!

Costs

After perusing this website some readers may believe that over the decades I have spent an inordinate amount of effort and money to assemble my PCs. Not so. I have so far assembled 3 supercomputers and each one lasted at least 7 years, with relatively minor updates. The components for each PC cost the same amount, around €3000, equivalent to less than €35 per month. As for the updates, I have an accurate accounting from 2011 onwards and the average expenditure is €17 per month. These expenses are very reasonable, given that for decades now I have spent most of my professional and entertaining activities in front of my PC.

My initial work with modest PCs

I first became familiar with personal computers in 1981, when the company I worked for in Buenos Aires sent me to London to visit their new “fleet” of Apple II. These lovely machines could do only two simple activities, spreadsheets (VisiCalc) and networking, but they did both affordably and flexibly. However, back in my company office in Buenos Aires I kept using mainframes via terminal.

Eventually in Jan. 1987 I had in my company desk my first PC: this was an IBM PC-XT, with DOS 3.0, IBM DisplayWrite 5 word processor and spreadsheets, Lotus 2.01 and later its version 3.1 “three-dimensional”, all in a “large hard disk” sporting an impressive capacity of 30Mb. Whoa!

When I left that job in mid-1991 there was not much use for a computer at home, but I bought one because I was now working free-lance. With an intel 386SX CPU, it was nothing exceptional, just an up-to-date PC. It run under DOS 3.3, to which I later added Windows 3.x, and was housed in a desktop “baby” case. Over the following 7 years it underwent quite a few upgrades.

Only in 1998 I was able to put together a really fast machine. To continue please click on the
“1998: Pentium MMX” button.