For some reason I remembered today my first trip to San Jose, in the early 2000s, for a SANS Institute class, and discovering the Fry's Electronics store. The amazing content of what one could use to build own computers, or tools for use with such, was like nothing else I have ever seen, anywhere else in the world where I've been, up until that point.

Some of the best related memories, though, come from the time when - as Chicagoan - I learned we will be getting our own Fry's. The excitement in the geeks community was so great, at the time, that we were sharing pictures of the progress of the actual lot being worked on, then the building (walls by walls), in Downers Grove.

We used to call the place "the church of IT people", simply because we would go there over the weekend, and stay over for the "mass" (equivalent time) and then some.

O tempora!

With the advent of buying online, from sites like Newegg, I felt like the local stores were much less exciting even back then. It was nice to be able to buy something same day but browsing Newegg and having broad selection was more fun for me.

Hmm must be different than the one I went to.

For me CompUSA was the one stop get your tech.

In Orlando (altmonte springs) we would go to lunch at Fudd Ruckers, followed up with an hour at CompUSA.

My memories are a bit different than yours. All of my memories of Fry's were of scamming, adding used stickers to items that were designed to fall on the floor, sales people that spoke English on Thursday but pretended not to on Friday. The sales people mishandled memory, would put used motherboards back in boxes as new with stickers that would label them as used but the stickers were intentionally cheap and would fall off. This was the Fry's in Fremont. It was the most shady dodgy electronics store I had ever been in. Some friends brought cameras into the store to record some of this and the store had the Fremont Police escort them out and threaten to arrest them if they returned.