Comment by mrloopex
16 hours ago
Let’s be clear: they were Lego-ing together parts from China. There were no mass produced PC components in the US by the 90s.
16 hours ago
Let’s be clear: they were Lego-ing together parts from China. There were no mass produced PC components in the US by the 90s.
Probably not china so much as Taiwan, japan, other places
Actually yes China. Hong Kong specifically before the manufacturing boom moved to mainland. By the 90s Japan had lost its DRAM edge and was not making any PC peripherals en masse. TSMC was barely three years old in 1990.
TSMC wasn't the major player until relatively recently. SuperMicro, Foxconn, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. have existed for quite some time and are all Taiwanese.
Technically Hong Kong wasn't China back then.
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You over focus on Hong Kong. Lots of stuff was in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia. Many things had supply chains over many places.
In the UK a typical Gateway 2000 desktop PC came with a Trinitron screen, made by Sony in South Wales.
Their business model for the UK was the same tax scam as Apple, Dell and others. Everything was mail order, operating out of Dublin.
Their products had quality multimedia toys (CD, speakers, decent screen, keyboard with extra programmable keys) combined with decent CPU/RAM/ROM/graphics for the price.
I did support for a small company that bought Gateway (in the UK) and there certainly were no 'Made in USA' labels anywhere.
I really liked their machines and I bought one myself because it had that Trinitron screen at a bargain price. I was very happy with that machine. In the UK they went a bit sour after dropping the '2000' branding with the cow spots.
Their laptops were not as successful as their desktop machines, where they never quite managed to compete in either the 'value for money' or 'nice to have' sectors. Dell, Toshiba and even Compaq had preferable laptops.
Their success in the UK was the Dell model (Ireland tax fiddle), except they didn't make you wait weeks for your machine (like Dell did, with it having to be 'built to order').
> Their business model for the UK was the same tax scam as Apple, Dell and others. Everything was mail order, operating out of Dublin.
I think to this day Monster Cable (ugh) still operates a similar scam, where the US company licenses all their cable technology (also ugh) from Monster Cable Bermuda, which exists only in a small four story office building that is the legal HQ of 15,000+ companies.