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Farewell Fry's Electronics

Fry’s Electronics has closed and is no more.

This is the receipt for our Amiga 2000, dated June 10 1989. My dad kept everything and when he passed away there was a lot of stuff to go through, but it was really cool to find this. Growing up in the Bay Area in the 80s/early 90s, I spent a lot of time in Fry’s. It was a huge influence on my computer nerdery and my dad took me almost every weekend so I could go look at all the cool new things.

Some Memories:

  • Buying our first PC XT clone from the original Fry’s in Sunnyvale.
  • Buying our NES from the original Fry’s.
  • Grabbing a free copy of MicroTimes on the way out.
  • Crystal Pepsi.
  • Reading video game magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, and GameFan there.
  • Driving home with our Amiga 2000 with it between my brother and I in the backseat of my dad’s 1971 Dodge Challenger.
  • Seeing Amiga demos like the Walker and Walker 2 demos.
  • Commodore CDTV and the Psygnosis Planetside demo
  • Some Sony GPS device that was like $900 and was huge and told you Lat, Lon and Alt.
  • Wanting Sony portables like the Discman D-555, the first MiniDisc player, the Video Walkman.
  • Buying Wing Commander 2 at the Sunnyvale store (the second Sunnyvale store) while having a really bad sore throat.
  • Getting Michael Jordan In Flight and we had to upgrade the vram on our video card from 256k to 512k. We bought the loose vram chips at Fry’s and installed them on the card.
  • ReelMagic card running Dragon’s Lair.
  • Macintosh TV, what a weird machine.
  • Seeing Space Quest 3 intro on a PC with a sound card and nice speakers.
  • My brother needed a graphing calculator so he, a friend, and I drove to literally every Fry’s in the Bay Area to try and find an HP 48G (we were an RPN family). In Utero had just come out and we were driving around blasting it. First time I heard that album.
  • Using a bunch of money I had saved up to split the cost of an HP 95LX with my parents. My dad was stoked I would learn Lotus 1-2-3.
  • Final Bay Area Fry’s memory from late 1993 before I moved to Colorado: going to the Fremont store and seeing Doom in person for the first time. Mind blowing.
  • One summer when I was back visiting, I went to the new Fremont store. They outgrew the original one and it just wasn’t the same anymore. The original Fremont store was next to the NeXT Computer factory and the NUMMI car plant, which is now the Tesla Factory.