The IIsi which is still in use at home didn't have any screws. You could use one optional screw to lock the case. For the rest you only needed your hands to (dis)assemble the entire computer.
My iBook, on the other hand, has about 50 screws and you need 3 different screwdrivers to unscrew them, plus either a very good memory or some paper templates to stick them into. Otherwise you're doomed to experience the IKEA effect when reassembling.
As the parent poster suggested it was MSDOS and its ease of use
Oh yes, the ease of using MS-DOS. For many people, using MS-DOS meant copying cryptic commands from a magical piece of paper, once written by the computer nerd next door, in order to start their favourite game or word processor. If something unusual happened, like 'Reading error. Abort, retry, fail?', or simply the vanishing of the Magic Paper or it becoming unreadable due to spilled coffee, it was total panic and the only rescue was a phone call to the same computer nerd next door...
I once had to create a bootable CD with a Win98 installer on it. Those days, there weren't many tools to easily create a bootable CD, so I looked at the El Torito specs and hand-built an ISO image of a bootable CD using a hex editor (never again!) The bottom-line is that I actually had to include a DOS floppy disk image at the end of the bootable CD. This image on its turn loaded a RAM drive or something, and the actual CD driver. Or something. At any rate, it was horror:-) I don't know if this method is still used on modern bootable CD's, but it wouldn't surprise me...
I've built a new PC and I didn't even think about providing room for a floppy drive. I just flashed the BIOS using a bootable USB key, worked perfectly. The only times I still use floppies is to move files to/from semi-antique computers. I really hope these things disappear soon because they are slow, unreliable, and ridiculously low-capacity to modern standards. The only people I can imagine to like using floppies would be sado-masochists who enjoy losing their valuable files. I still think back with horror at the times when I had to transfer 10~20MB files by floppies. Upon arrival, there was always at least one disk with bad sectors, even if I checked the disks after writing. Because the file was ZIPed, the slightest error made the whole unusable. On a Mac disk drive you could really hear them coming, the drive always made a specific ominous sound when encountering a bad sector...
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I suggest we team together, create a temporary company, and patent the sum, aka '+', operator.
The IIsi which is still in use at home didn't have any screws. You could use one optional screw to lock the case. For the rest you only needed your hands to (dis)assemble the entire computer. My iBook, on the other hand, has about 50 screws and you need 3 different screwdrivers to unscrew them, plus either a very good memory or some paper templates to stick them into. Otherwise you're doomed to experience the IKEA effect when reassembling.
As the parent poster suggested it was MSDOS and its ease of use
Oh yes, the ease of using MS-DOS. For many people, using MS-DOS meant copying cryptic commands from a magical piece of paper, once written by the computer nerd next door, in order to start their favourite game or word processor. If something unusual happened, like 'Reading error. Abort, retry, fail?', or simply the vanishing of the Magic Paper or it becoming unreadable due to spilled coffee, it was total panic and the only rescue was a phone call to the same computer nerd next door...
I once had to create a bootable CD with a Win98 installer on it. Those days, there weren't many tools to easily create a bootable CD, so I looked at the El Torito specs and hand-built an ISO image of a bootable CD using a hex editor (never again!) The bottom-line is that I actually had to include a DOS floppy disk image at the end of the bootable CD. This image on its turn loaded a RAM drive or something, and the actual CD driver. Or something. At any rate, it was horror :-) I don't know if this method is still used on modern bootable CD's, but it wouldn't surprise me...
I've built a new PC and I didn't even think about providing room for a floppy drive. I just flashed the BIOS using a bootable USB key, worked perfectly. The only times I still use floppies is to move files to/from semi-antique computers. I really hope these things disappear soon because they are slow, unreliable, and ridiculously low-capacity to modern standards. The only people I can imagine to like using floppies would be sado-masochists who enjoy losing their valuable files. I still think back with horror at the times when I had to transfer 10~20MB files by floppies. Upon arrival, there was always at least one disk with bad sectors, even if I checked the disks after writing. Because the file was ZIPed, the slightest error made the whole unusable. On a Mac disk drive you could really hear them coming, the drive always made a specific ominous sound when encountering a bad sector...