When I built my first system in 1998, I was pretty impressed with how easy things were. Basically I
just plugged things in, clicked through a few screens, and everything worked. The hardest
part was figuring out how the motherboard fit into the chassis.
(Pat and I scratched our heads over all those metal widgets for a couple of hours,
to be sure.)

But everything else was idiot-proof. You couldn’t even plug anything in backwards.
It was great. We were up and running
Starcraft in no time.

I had heard that in the bad old days, building a computer was
difficult. For Serious Enthusiasts Only. But along came standards. Plug ‘N Play, USB,
huzzah!

Things seemed to be working reasonably well three years ago. I assumed things
would be the same today. Oh, well.

The only thing certain to remain constant — my own naivete.