time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history
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time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history
IBM Home Computing seems to have been a canada-only chain of retail stores that sold IBM products. it didn't last long here - maybe 5-10 years - before it disappeared in the early 2000s. we had a single location in downtown Edmonton City Centre Mall in the mid-90s.
it wasn't the place to go for the best deals on hardware and software. everything was sold at retail prices, and i remember seeing very few sales. i remember buying my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold at the downtown location as a first-year university student for the princely sum of $300.
as you can see in the last photo - buying an IBM in 1994 was a major investment. you could buy three used cars at the time for less than a pentium desktop.
does anyone else remember these retail stores? did they exist in the US, or was it a canadian chain?
update: according to this page, there were 29 stores in canada
https://en.everybodywiki.com/IBM_Home_Computing_Storesand it did indeed close chainwide in 2002-2003:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ibm-canada-to-shut-stores-as-result-of-shrinking-retail-sales/article1021826/#ibm #os2 #history #retrocomputing #yeg #yegdt #canada