Nose Gear Up Landing at Fort Lauderdale Executive

Looks like they owned a fleet squadron of L-39's too.

No wonder they went broke.

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Sponsored. They also sponsored this guy:

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I don't miss the stores. Central computer is still around and they're much better anyway.
Really? You are the first person in the Bay Area I've ever heard make that statement LOL. Fry's stores were all ridiculously themed with really creepy displays all over the dimly lit giant space they occupied, and their return policy was way, way more liberal. One time I was getting a CPU and I got 3 bad ones in a row and then I noticed that they didn't seem to care by the fact they never said anything questioning if I was just being stupid and breaking them LOL (nope! kept taking them home to find a tiny bent little prong inside...). Last I checked, Central Computer doesn't price match like Fry's either. I seriously got $200 off a part once because some store was undercutting everyone on Amazon LOL. Best Buy would have said "NO we don't pricematch rediculous prices" (as they have said to at least myself and Nathan Fielder). Loved that place, they also had an awesome selection of snacks and exotic caffinated drinks, they were the only retailer of BAWLS energy drinks I've seen since the cyber lounges went bye bye in the early 2010s. It was unique, felt kind of underground. Central Computer feels like an Office Depot that's just 10 times the size to me.

My experience with Fry's was always negative.

Saw memory on sale at a really good price. Went there and the memory was out in the isle, people were opening the static bags and touching it.

It was kind of a computer junk store.
That was all part of the fun! They'd always give me a discount if all they had left was a display part, and with their return policy, who cares?

I marshalled, fueled, and threw bags for the whole Frys fleet at one point. Weird stores, weird family. I remember the first time they brought the 747SP into SJC and put a bunch of people on it for a booze cruise and were out flying so low over the coast that people reported an aircraft accident. When they got back an hour or so later someone was so drunk they fell off the airstair and were injured very badly. Putting the Sabre in the hangar was the hardest tow job you did. I drove Randy's Ferrari to an auto detailer once.

OMG this story makes me worship them LOL YES! Talk about living the dream, now that is making use of a private 747. My friend grew up near Sacramento with his parents living next door to one of the Fry's pilots who flew the 727 and 747 simultaneously (gotta love part 91). I never imagined they'd use the aircraft like this, I'll try to get in touch with him for stories.
 
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How'd he do that?

Must have looked funny in the log book.
Dunno, pretty sure the 747SP was retrofitted with a glass cockpit, too. But he had said he was typed in and actively flew both for the short time they overlapped in the fleet. I got the impression just from what I'd heard that they didn't have too many pilots so it's likely some of them flew more than one type.
 
Dunno, pretty sure the 747SP was retrofitted with a glass cockpit, too. But he had said he was typed in and actively flew both for the short time they overlapped in the fleet. I got the impression just from what I'd heard that they didn't have too many pilots so it's likely some of them flew more than one type.
If you had got to fly the 727 and 747 in the same day that would be worth noting.
 
Dunno, pretty sure the 747SP was retrofitted with a glass cockpit, too. But he had said he was typed in and actively flew both for the short time they overlapped in the fleet. I got the impression just from what I'd heard that they didn't have too many pilots so it's likely some of them flew more than one type.

That went right over your head didn’t it?


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OMG this story makes me worship them LOL YES! Talk about living the dream, now that is making use of a private 747. My friend grew up near Sacramento with his parents living next door to one of the Fry's pilots who flew the 727 and 747 simultaneously (gotta love part 91). I never imagined they'd use the aircraft like this, I'll try to get in touch with him for stories.

Their flight engineer was a guy named Jack and the supes used to call him "Jack Off the Boeing" ;)

"Someone take the van and go pick up Jack Off the Boeing at terminal C" ;)
 
The Fry's inventory strategy for a long while was to buy-out trailing inventory and returns from other places ... basically clear others' shelves at a steep discount. So the stuff on shelves at Fry's was always "older models" of stuff. Like if you were looking at video cards, Best Buy might have the "Cockinator 3000" v2.1 where they fixed the layout because customers were early failure from a batch of bad capacitors or a lousy heatsink design, for example.

Fry's would have a shelf full of v1.0 Cockinators at maybe 97% of the Best Buy price to sell to people who didn't know better or "needed something now."

Towards the very end they tried to play a consignment model where vendors were expected to rent space on their shelves. To my knowledge nobody was dumb enough to participate in that, especially when it was unclear what would happen to that inventory when the store went bankrupt.
 
That went right over your head didn’t it?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
No, I got the joke, 2 planes at once, real knee slapper, I acknowledged his joke with a like right? But I do think it's an odd combo for sure to be current in both, especially with a retrofitted glass cockpit. Very interesting to me how people manage this stuff in Part 91. I don't know if this is still the case, but for a long time Germany wouldn't even let their flight attendants be qualified on more than 2-3 types at once at the airlines. Hats off to anyone who can manage actively flying 2 totally different vintage airliners and staying current.

The Fry's inventory strategy for a long while was to buy-out trailing inventory and returns from other places ... basically, clear others' shelves at a steep discount. So the stuff on shelves at Fry's was always "older models" of stuff. Like if you were looking at video cards, Best Buy might have the "Cockinator 3000" v2.1 where they fixed the layout because customers were early failure from a batch of bad capacitors or a lousy heatsink design, for example.

Fry's would have a shelf full of v1.0 Cockinators at maybe 97% of the Best Buy price to sell to people who didn't know better or "needed something now."

Towards the very end they tried to play a consignment model where vendors were expected to rent space on their shelves. To my knowledge, nobody was dumb enough to participate in that, especially when it was unclear what would happen to that inventory when the store went bankrupt.
By the late 2000s/early 2010s when I was building PCs for people as a side hustle, they did have the newer stuff. Never out on display, always locked up with just little "tickets" you'd take to employees for the items.
 
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I call MicroCenter a non-crappy and successful Fry’s.

Microcenter's were legit.

NewEgg is another place that augured in with customer service after a very successful run. I got so frustrated with their service, I actually built my last PC (X99 mobo, mid-range graphics in SLI) from parts I bought off of Amazon, of all things. Buying stuff like that off Amazon is a real crapshoot. Maybe they cleaned up their act lately.

Digi-key FTW, BTW.
 
Microcenter's were legit.

NewEgg is another place that augured in with customer service after a very successful run. I got so frustrated with their service, I actually built my last PC (X99 mobo, mid-range graphics in SLI) from parts I bought off of Amazon, of all things. Buying stuff like that off Amazon is a real crapshoot. Maybe they cleaned up their act lately.

Digi-key FTW, BTW.
I’d still rather take the chance of a swing and a miss with Newegg…I think? I dunno.

I wound up buying from Falcon Northwest for this latest PC. Before that, MicroCenter was where I bought parts when there were parts to buy.
 
I’d still rather take the chance of a swing and a miss with Newegg…I think? I dunno.

I wound up buying from Falcon Northwest for this latest PC. Before that, MicroCenter was where I bought parts when there were parts to buy.

It worked out. The only bummer was about 14 months later I got a dead pixel on one of the flat screens. I went to replace it with an identical model, and the color temp was all different, which can happen with LCDs from different batches. Nothing I did would fix it.

It was so distracting, I wound up just making the monitor with the dead pixel my secondary and using the new one on my PC that drives my 3D printer.

All in all, nice system, tho.
 
It worked out. The only bummer was about 14 months later I got a dead pixel on one of the flat screens. I went to replace it with an identical model, and the color temp was all different, which can happen with LCDs from different batches. Nothing I did would fix it.

It was so distracting, I wound up just making the monitor with the dead pixel my secondary and using the new one on my PC that drives my 3D printer.

All in all, nice system, tho.
CompUSA ftw
 
Whatever happened to Gateway? (Because I'm an old fart.)

Cows ate it.

Imma old fart too…my computers:

PMC-80 (TRS-80 clone)
Apple ][+ (later fully tricked out w/z80 card and lots of extras)
Epson QX-10 (CP/M machine)
IBM PS/2 Model 50
Zeos PC clone
Gateway PC clone
From there I started building my own systems. 1st one was a very generic mobo, next one I can’t remember, then a Gigabyte mobo, which lasted 10+ years and still runs in my workshop.

Current one is a MSI X99 mobo, all SSD setup with twin GPUs running in SLI.

Prebuilt PCs these days are utter & complete garbage. Very high mortality rate and chock full of bloat ware. I refuse to either build one for people or to recommend a brand. No good can come from it because you’ll either be on the hook for 24/7 support or get blamed when the POS store bought inevitably dies.

I use Macs for laptops because the last thing I want to do is futz with one on the road. They won’t seem to die….I’ve have 4, a G4 PowerBook, a 2009 Intel Powerbook, a 2013 Air, and the very last intel PowerBook that Apple made last year. They all still work.
 
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