Who were the worst of the worst?

On 2/14/2013 11:53 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Packard bell as in the PC company had zero to do with the original company of the same name (TV sets etc.). It was licensed by a mob in the San Fernando Valley in the LA area and was just a mashup of parts The IBM PC Clones started out from a couple of designs, one of which I know was done in Orange County, ca by a guy who basically took the IBM PC tech reference and a copy of the bios and basic roms and built up a board which would run with those chips plugged into it. I bought a bare board and built it up. Later he went bigtime and called himself "Super computer" and stopped selling bare boards, but I saw lots of the same boards and ones from the same mask (the layout was by hand and had unique features) in lots of clcones. Later as the companies in Taiwan grew, they could not ship stuff fast enough apparently and a large number of family members in the US at least in the OC area started up computer stores. I bought from two and knew the people at both ends of the line, and all of the Acer and other Taiwnese company stories matched with only differences in scale and people. For some reason the Koreans could never do anything right. They bought up another company for real $$ started by some friends here, Micro 5 and attempted to go big time with that company selling Novell servers. That product made a lot of server companies or broke them. The Koreans (Samsung) sunk that company like a brick after buying them by taking the main thing that M5 did special away and saying "you don't really need it" All of their customers with any engineering resources did what they should have, re-engineered their main design, and the few small ones went with a friend who had a deal with Samsung to make the original hardware and made him a lot of money. BTW the feature was the M5 386's and Pentium motherboards had lots of slots, I think one bit tower had 13 slots. Samsung pulled that hardware and pushed in their own with only the usual number of slots, and lost all the customers. Somehow they though since they were building servers they could buy up the company and jam their own Novell kit down their throats. I think that operation cost them in the tens of millions in the final analysis The repeated the same operation but at the cost of in the billions was Samsung acquired AST Research. same story lots more money. BTW, A S and T made out well, though T had gone off some time before from the company. So bottom line, the contents of the boxes were just a shuffle from one month / batch to the next. The main building blocks I saw fights about were mother board reference designs / chipsets, where to get memory, how much to pay for a bios (40,000 AMI), where to get boxes, where to get hard drives to put in the boxes. You would have seen various headlines and advertisements when these were going on, but the driving force were the business maneuvers behind these and the players not the designs. They didn't matter.