Mercutio said:
Menards (but not HD) also sells a $100, wall-mount 4U rack in their telco wiring section. Never bought one, but it's still cool to see.
Yes, it is! I didn't really draw out that aspect very well in my post.
I shop for my network wiring/jacks at Home Depot really for two reasons:
1) I want stuff now. Not in 2 days, not overnight. Now. Shipping via express takes too long. :wink: (Not to mention adding to the price.)
2) I want to encourage vendors of "traditional" goods to continue branching into newer territory. This is a major point with me ... I know many would just tell me I'm crazy and tell me to look for better deals online, but I'll try to explain why I do my best to prove to these traditional vendors that they do have a market for this stuff.
Point #2 goes right back to what you said Mercutio .. it
is cool to see. When I stop to think about it, seeing hardware stores carrying networking products really just amazes me.
It reminds me of back in the mid-1990's, when slowly I began to see places like grocery stores carrying computer software and media. That amazed me back then too. Nowadays, I can go to any drug store ... a
drug store ... and have an extremely good chance at finding some blank floppy disks and packages of CD-Rs. That rocks! It's so useful! And it's amazing to me.
Ever since the mid 1980's, when I first started working with computers, one of the real drags was that it was such a niche thing to be interested in. Options were few, and if I needed anything, it usually meant a trip to one place: Radio Shack. Occasionally, if my father were up to the drive, I might be able to make it to one of the dedicated computer shops. But they were a long way away, and that was how it was for a long time. (And I lived in California ... god knows how hard it would have been for people interested in computers back then in, say, Maine.)
So that's my "foundation" if you will, as to how I view the world as it changes with respect to computers. Every once in a while I'm amazed again as yet more technology becomes so commonplace that you can find everyday-type vendors selling the kinds of things that used to be
so hard to find. It reminds me how difficult it used to be to find cool stuff, and how I couldn't possibly have imagined back then how
common computer technology would become.
It also adds an element of reassurance - that I wasn't crazy to have been interested in computer stuff back in the late 1980's. Or that I was dreaming about networking a home in the mid-1990's. Eventually everyone else realized that I was right ... that what I was looking at really
was kind of a neat potential. I just beat them to the realization. You know the feeling? Mercutio or anyone else feel like that sometimes?
