You probably have no memory of the day Gateway 2000 started selling complete computers and opening the floodgates to a hundred million idiots who had seen an ad for CompuServe in the back of Omni.

In the land of PC/Dos, you bought IBM, you bought Compaq, or - if you weren't a major multinational corporation - you rolled your own. First Gateway, then Dell, then EVERYBODY attempted to sell PCs to people who had no reason for them. The result was a glut of PCs with no resale value whatsoever.

It's taken twenty years for the component manufacturers to figure out how to make their margins - and their answer has been to go after the gamers. The effect of this has been to winnow the field down to component manufacturers who can make modestly-priced, high-performance components using much smaller production runs than Acer or Dell or Lenovo or whoever can manage.

So in the end, we're back where we started - with PC makers being a market segment rather than a market force and with most serious people rolling their own.

Do not mourn the passing of the mainstream desktop. It is an anomaly in the flow of time, a side effect of every household running Windows 98 because it was the only way to check your AOL. We are better for its absence.