@juliansgamble the “back rooms” of such shops remained a mystery to this day, where many mysterious PC ailments were fixed, with lord knows what mixture of sheer parts replacement — probably 99% — leaving us to wonder what kind of stash of incredible supplies they had back there

Because nobody knew where it all came from. Brands? No. Standards? Maybe, “you tell me” if you’re so clever. “If it doesn’t work, bring it back”, and sure enough, they replaced the meat in your sub sandwich until it was fine.

Occasionally an Aussie, with neither technical background nor an ability to communicate with people speaking English as a second language, would walk in the door — aware of very little, except that they needed their first computer, and they needed to come here to save money.

Unfortunately they would still carry the old-world assumption that a “retailer” was not just a sales rep but also a source of advice. Maybe they’d try to negotiate for a discount — the learning curve was too steep to climb — or more often, they’d come armed with a bunch of questions about “all these computers” and if they should get Windows.

They’d usually be happy when they understood Windows was just added for free — the first form of “activation” was not until Windows 95 — but if they wanted any manuals, let alone some kind of set up tutorial, they were going to walk out annoyed.

An Apple Store, this was not.

(Or “AppleCentre”, in Australia back then).

They could even threaten to walk 5 minutes to the next one — the Chinese computer shops were everywhere — but these weren’t “salesmen” they were dealing with. None of this stuff had margins built in. What was the point of asking for a discount, if it was all bare-bones naked robotic and generic already? Everybody was getting a good price, you just had to know the industry to see that.

If you were foolish enough to turn up with a copy of PC Magazine and point to a branded PC and ask “do you have this one?”, you should just be prepared to have something with equivalent specs made up in half an hour for a third of the price. It won’t look anything like the one in your photo of course. But you can have a different keyboard with differently bizarre shades of beige if you’re not happy?

(Apple was the lone wolf making keyboards that chose one color for every key … somehow. The list of trends that Apple birthed or stopped might never be completely written).

It may have been 30 years before most people said the word “Temu”, but for sure they were doing the same exact type of unbranded factory shipping.

Except there was no internet. It must have been phone calls to family back in China, right?