u/richneptune

It's why you can only find a brush or 3 dustpans when you desperately need one

Possibly the best outcome of all the tabled proposals, IMO. Still, a lot of people in NuL and the Moorlands won't be happy.

Did anyone else go to computer fairs in the late 90's and early noughties?

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The premise was simple, you'd keep your eye on the local paper and when one was advertised turn up early on a Saturday morning at the local football stadium or leisure centre, pay a small entry fee, and then go into a hall heaving with stalls with businesses selling everything you could think of: whole systems, components, accessories, software, games. It felt like part commercial sellers, part boot sale.

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A lot of the sellers were...interesting. I bought my flatbed scanner from a bloke who had an Alsatian with him, to show the quality of his scanner and printer wares, he'd scanned and printed £20 notes and stuck them all over his table, as if that would attract people into believing they could make their fortune in counterfeiting by buying stuff from his stall.

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The stuff I saw there was amazing, like double height tower cases filled with CD writers that were likely for sale to the PlayStation pirates, you could get your PlayStation chipped while you waited in the early days, but I'm sure the organisers clamped down on it as time went on. I used to buy huge boxes of unbranded gold CDRs all in jewel cases because the multi CD spindle wasn't common, and they were way cheaper than any shop.

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By about 2005 the fairs just seemed to disappear from the face of the earth.