World Power Systems: Memory boards, big ads, great prices, non-existent company. Some guy named "The Colonel" who of course wasn't. Magazine ads on credit, graphic design for said ads on credit, prepayment from customers never returned. Not just in Byte magazine, also (at least) kilobaud and Interface Age, year was 1978? Whole thing was blown by the editor of Interface Age, who was suspicious and called to "do a story" on the company. When he showed up, "The Colonel" was on the lam, and there was nothing but an empty office and a phone. An almost identical scam happened in, as I recall, 1979, when a company placed multipage color ads for a bunch of really cool, inexpensive TRS-80 Model 1 peripherals in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, then disappeared. And let's not forget Morrow, which, after changing names to Xibec (Xidec?) and announcing & taking orders for some super doozy computer called The General, also vanished overnight. Kai -----Original Message----- From: Sam Ismail [mailto:dastar@ncal.verio.com] Sent: Thursday, October 08, 1998 3:26 PM To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers Subject: Re: World Power Systems scam On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, John Foust wrote: What was the nature of this scam? Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Ever onward. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 09/21/98]