Sacramento Fry’s off Northgate was my go-to store circa ’98. Whenever a friend wanted to build a PC, that’s where we went. The employees were great; the salespeople, not so much.
I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.
I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.
I’m also from Sacramento and I also have fond memory of that same Fry’s location in the 2000s. It was an excellent place to buy new computer hardware and other electronics. I still have the Brother laser printer I bought there in December 2005 during winter break of my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO; not only does my printer still work, but I’m still using the original 20-year toner cartridge!
I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.
This takes me back to 2004 when I inherited a NasRaQ, the original company file server, which had been replaced by a Windows Server 2000/2003 a few years prior. It became my go-to storage for Ghost and ISO images until the company gifted it to me around 2009. I may have had to replace one of the two drives while it was in service, but it was a rock-solid machine! Finally sold it on Craigslist in 2011, but I’m pretty sure it would’ve kept on trucking. Would've loved to try this out!"
If you've got a machine running Proxmox you can throw the VM right in and boot it! It should enable all the required settings automatically and let you log in with the default admin/admin credentials
Amusing because it's kinda true; although there are a # of startups in the area where the pay is decent (not big tech salary or crazy RSUs by any means). IIRC Sysdig was founded in Davis before they moved to SF.
Tech meetups in general have lacked but non-tech related meetups have always been good - board games, etc.
I think people are more well rounded and realistic about work / life balance than Bay Area tech and that's what makes Sac seem a little sleepy.
- 2004 custom dual boot gaming desktop is running FreeNAS at a friend's house
- 2007 custom desktop survived until 2019 when a power surge fried the motherboard, memory and PSU. I repurposed the case and drives (which survived!)
- 2011 MBP is really one of the best. Replaced the battery, memory and display over the years. Now dedicated shared kids machine because parental controls are super simple for all adults
- 2015 MBP is my personal laptop for freelance work, learning, etc. Will most likely repurpose it as the kids shared laptop after I do a battery replacement. The 2011 will then migrate to storage until I'm sure I won't need things like a CD/DVD drive, SDXC card slot, Thunderbolt port, Firewire, Ethernet, etc.
- 2009 Samsung SyncMaster 23" is still used as a secondary monitor
- 2007 Razer mouse still used today
- 2012 (?) original RaspberryPi is my wireless print and scanning server
It blows my mind (in a good way) that people are still posting this to Hacker news. I remember writing code for MenuetOS in both my Operating Systems and Hardware classes in ~2002. Love it!
I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.
I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.