PC enthusiasts have been overclocking their hardware since before I owned a PC. At the risk of sounding like an old person, I had to move jumpers around on my Shuttle HOT-555A to get that Socket 7's motherboard to run its front-side bus at 83 MHz instead of 66. That took my Pentium MMX 166 MHz up to 207 MHz. The prevailing thought among enthusiasts seemed to be "why not overclock? It's free performance." The process was a little intimidating to me at first, and many average PC users either didn't know about it or were afraid to mess with the default settings. Fast forward a few years and motherboards started to make things easier. Abit's KT7  was the first motherboard I can think of that had a jumper-free overclocking experience. You could press a hotkey at boot time and mess around with voltages and bus timings right on your PC monitor.