<story><title>Fry&apos;s Electronics is closing all stores</title><url>https://twitter.com/bill0004/status/1364407906192424964</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>I graduated college in 1985 and moved cross country to Sunnyvale for work. Fry&amp;#x27;s was a supermarket chain, and at the time there was one and only one location that was trying out carrying computer stuff, on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence.&lt;p&gt;They weren&amp;#x27;t yet fully committed to it. Half the store was produce and such -- milk, eggs, lettuce, etc, and the other half was rows of TTL parts, memory chips, diodes, capacitors, and resistors. It blew my mind. I bought a 68000 CPU, 128KB of DRAM chips (64Kx1 density back then), a perf board, wirewrap wire and a wrapping tool, EPROMs, sockets, and built my first computer all from parts I bought at that Fry&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;About 60 seconds away from Fry&amp;#x27;s was Computer Literacy -- a really great bookstore that, as the name implies, had nothing but computer related books. It wasn&amp;#x27;t 20 copies of &amp;quot;Computers for Dummies&amp;quot; books. The vast majority of inventory were single copies of the most arcane stuff -- all sorts of college level CS textbooks, and you could ask the desk to order just about anything if you knew the title of it.&lt;p&gt;I sent a lot of money and time in both locations. Silicon Valley felt like a magical place back then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snapetom</author><text>I lived near the Palo Alto Fry&amp;#x27;s around the same time when I was a kid, and I always remembered it as a supermarket with some electronics.  It wasn&amp;#x27;t until college that I got interested in computers and electronics and started to go back to Fry&amp;#x27;s again.  I was always sort of puzzled - did I remember the supermarket correctly?  Was it a Fry&amp;#x27;s?  Whenever I said to people, &amp;quot;Fry&amp;#x27;s was a supermarket,&amp;quot; they looked at me like I was indeed crazy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fry&apos;s Electronics is closing all stores</title><url>https://twitter.com/bill0004/status/1364407906192424964</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>I graduated college in 1985 and moved cross country to Sunnyvale for work. Fry&amp;#x27;s was a supermarket chain, and at the time there was one and only one location that was trying out carrying computer stuff, on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence.&lt;p&gt;They weren&amp;#x27;t yet fully committed to it. Half the store was produce and such -- milk, eggs, lettuce, etc, and the other half was rows of TTL parts, memory chips, diodes, capacitors, and resistors. It blew my mind. I bought a 68000 CPU, 128KB of DRAM chips (64Kx1 density back then), a perf board, wirewrap wire and a wrapping tool, EPROMs, sockets, and built my first computer all from parts I bought at that Fry&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;About 60 seconds away from Fry&amp;#x27;s was Computer Literacy -- a really great bookstore that, as the name implies, had nothing but computer related books. It wasn&amp;#x27;t 20 copies of &amp;quot;Computers for Dummies&amp;quot; books. The vast majority of inventory were single copies of the most arcane stuff -- all sorts of college level CS textbooks, and you could ask the desk to order just about anything if you knew the title of it.&lt;p&gt;I sent a lot of money and time in both locations. Silicon Valley felt like a magical place back then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mtviewdave</author><text>&amp;gt; on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence.&lt;p&gt;541 Lakeside Drive, Sunnyvale, to be exact. That was the original location of the original Fry&amp;#x27;s. That location moved across Lawrence Expy. sometime in the fall of 1990.</text></comment>