1.1. Purpose of this document
The purpose of this document is to give you the background
information you need to be a savvy buyer of Intel hardware for running
Unix. It is aimed especially at hackers and others with the technical
skills and confidence to go to the mail-order channel, but contains
plenty of useful advice for people buying store-front retail.
This document is maintained and periodically updated as a service to
the net by Eric S. Raymond, who began it for the very best self-interested
reason that he was in the market and didn't believe in plonking down
several grand without doing his homework first (no, I don't get paid for
this, though I have had a bunch of free software and hardware dumped on me
as a result of it!). Corrections, updates, and all pertinent information
are welcomed at esr at snark.thyrsus.com. The
editorial «we’ reflects the generous contributions of many
savvy Internetters.
If you email me questions that address gaps in the FAQ material,
you will probably get a reply that says "Sorry, everything I know
about this topic is in the HOWTO". If you find out the
answer to such a question, please share it with
me for the HOWTO, so everyone can benefit.
If you end up buying something based on information from this HOWTO,
please do yourself and the net a favor; make a point of telling the vendor
"The HOWTO sent me" or some equivalent. If we can show
vendors that this HOWTO influences a lot of purchasing decisions, we get
leverage to change some things that need changing.
Note that in December 1996 I published an introductory article on
building and tuning Linux systems summarizing much of the material in this
HOWTO. It's available
here. In 2001 I published an article on building the Ultimate Linux
Box.
This Buyer's Guide actually dates back to 1992, when it was known as
the "PC-Clone Unix Hardware Buyer's Guide"; this was before Linux
took over my world :-). Before that, portions of it were part of
a Unix Buyer's Guide that I maintained back in the 1980s on USENET.
It may be a matter of historical interest that the page count of this
guide peaked in mid-2001 and has been declining since. Video, sound, and
other functions are migrating onto motherboards. Several bus types have
disappeared, as have all the old-school backup technologies that couldn't
scale up to match disk capacities, Spec sheets are getting
simpler. Accordingly, there are parts that used to have whole sections to
hemselves that I barely even write about anymore —floppy disks and
keyboards, for example, are utterly generic now,
In retrospect, the success of the ATX standard for motherboards in
1998-1999 was probably the turning point. The PC industry has become
sufficiently commoditized that your choices are now getting simpler rather
than more complicated. This is a Good Thing.
Take our 
