## 14 My (PC) shop around the corner

Last week I went to a town not far from where I was born. It's a town with a big mall, shopping centres and now a cinema, a fitness centre, etc... The typical commercial zone in the suburbs of big cities in France, with more billboards than trees. I have known this town since I was 15. And in my 20s it was where my PC dealer was. Oh, it was not where I bought my first PC or where I bought a lot of spare parts in 1996-1997, because it was too expensive compared to Paris and the famous Rue Montgallet. But when I started working, a friend of mine showed me a small shop in the town. It was in an old house, nothing to do with an usual shop. Just a car park as a garden. But there was a workshop and you could buy a complete PC or spare parts, like in any PC shop. The boss was a French-Vietnamese and had another employee to manage the shop, do the repairs, etc.

But something was different from the other shops, because we went there not just to buy, but to share... To exchange information about new games, about Windows tweaks and other things, but not only that... They had two PCs in a kind of "self-service". You could bring a hard drive rack and share some files with other .... users or customers. If you think about it now, it was very dangerous. But in those years, the Internet was with 56K modems and there were some "hackers" and what we called in French "Déplombeur", which is the equivalent of breaking a seal. Some of the customers specialized in this "sport" of removing protection from games or software, or creating key generators. I know one guy got in trouble with the law for that, but nobody went to see what was going on in that shop. Movies, games, softwares were shared as informations to reach better performances with your machine.

Before the P2P era and the internet, it was a small world of sharing. Like in the film "You've got mail", it was different from all the big PC shops. I bought my second real PC (I upgraded the first one before...) and I made them build it for me with an Antec case, which was rare in those years. It was an Intel CPU, not an AMD, and this PC has made two moves with me without any damage (The case was so heavy and strong...). I just changed the graphics card and the fans.... But I was far from that shop at that time and the boss had left, as had the customers and all the "hackers" with what ADSL made possible. The building was sold and now it's been demolished and replaced by ...., a multiplex cinema. With all the shops in Paris gone, there are now only repair shops for laptops and smartphones. It was a very short period in the history of home computing. I watched a lot of films, listened to a lot of music and discovered a lot of technologies and software thanks to this shop. I was the only one who was interest
ed in a new operating system, known as "Linux", which was ready to conquer the world in 1998-1999....hum, not really, but that's another story.

In the city next to my home, there is a small shop for PC repair in the basement of a house. It's always empty with no cars or people waiting in front of ir. Gamers PC are not sold in those shops now and I don't even know the market share between laptops and desktop PCs. It's the proof that in IT and Tech, everything is going so fast. Sometimes, you will remember that the smartphone Era has been a short time in your life, … And you'll remember than other types of shops are gone.

2Dɛ

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