I had built my first computer when I was 13, and the graphics card and hard disk drive were some of the components I waited until Black Friday to get.  I remember going to the Best Buy that had opened in our area because they had a Geforce 3 Ti200 as part of the sale. When we got there at 2am there were already people in line and I was so upset that my mother wouldn't take me there earlier (I was 13 or so at the time).  I assumed everyone in line was there for a graphics card. We got in line and I kept hyper-fixating that there might not be enough, and the Best Buy employees would only tell me they had "a few" graphics cards.  I finally went up and down the line and asked people what brought them out, and to my relief everyone answered "the TV".   I remember figuring out the price of per GB on the HDD and being happy when it reached under $3.50 a GB.   It was a cold fall night in Rhode Island, and the Best Buy staff invited us into the store early to have coffee and donuts (no shopping allowed and stay in the front!).  Overall it was an awesome experience.  The Geforce 3 was a significant improvement along with the new PC I had built over my previous computer, which had a Pentium 2 alongside a Voodoo2.  Along with these improvements came the beginning of the end of playing Descent 1 & 2 on Kali - the games ran too fast, and client-side made missiles / lasers fly too fast at me.  The ship also bobbed up and down wayy to fast.  Descent 3 was fun, but it had it's own tracker, and Kali was becoming obsolete.  Rainbow 6 and RB6 Rogue Spear were fun though.
 
So I recently went to build another PC as the last one I put together was around 2003 or so, and I think that had a Geforce 4 Ti-4200 and used SATA cables for everything.  Building a PC now, it seems no one installs DVD/CD burners in them, and the towers are all a lot smaller than back in the day.  I understand why cables changed, but why are the towers so small these days?   What happened to cold-cathode tubes?  Addressable LED's are cool, but those blue cold-cathode tubes were great! The ones I had made my computer look sweeeeeeeet.  Along with that build came Battlefield 1942, and the highlight of that to me was getting a modder to put a Pyro-GX in a modded Wake Island map.  It handled like a pyro, shot lasers and missiles.  It handled a little clunky but overall was pretty awesome. The screenshots and mods I believe have been lost to time...  Also: is it safe to mark the center of my screen with a dry-erase, so I can no-scope people?  The old CRT's were great because it was legit glass.  I can't tell what the heck the surface of this Asus screen is made of.
 
What games do you guys miss?  It's great the PC gaming has become so easily, but along the way it seems we've lost a lot of community and the ability to create custom maps, weapons, and mods.  The tent is larger, but there are people inspecting our bags at the door and dumping out anything to make the experience unique.  What are your thoughts?
 
- Jeremy

Roxysims
I miss being able to buy this stuff at physical stores. I'll never forget how much fun it was looking around at Fry's.

Best Buy has most everything, CPU's, motherboards, SSD's, etc. and if not in stock it can be shipped to store.

Buying (decent) PC stuff in EU these days is nearly impossible. Back in the day was not that strange to buy decent parts from the hardware store around the corner, it was a bit more expensive than a big retailer but still doable

 
Moved to Hardware.

I miss being able to buy this stuff at physical stores, anyway times are changed alot but not all is great, in my opinion gaming was better 15 years ago, not mainstream as now, i miss the magic

I miss being able to buy video cards at Microcenter. My local Microcenter is currently scalping 1050 ti cards for $279

fase2000tdi 
So I recently went to build another PC as the last one I put together was around 2003 or so, and I think that had a Geforce 4 Ti-4200 and used SATA cables for everything.  

2003 was still mostly IDE, SATA was just starting to show up. I remember picking up at 10GB HDD thinking there's no way I'd ever need that much and I was super pumped for the Athlon line and a single gig of RAM.