FA+
Shop
313
Views
Views
7
Favorites
Favorites
Category
Photography / Miscellaneous
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 960
File Size 153.3 kB
Report this content
More from IBM
This is where I am most of the time.
Category Photography / Miscellaneous
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 960px
File Size 153.3 kB
Gateway bought eMachines a good few years before it finished imploding.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/1145.....emachines.html (2004)
(Also, as to the original photo, damn that's a lot of CRT. Time to move up to 24"+ LCD, man, your eyeballs will thank you once the world stops looking curved inwards. And the >20W savings on the electric bill might subsidize it...)
Also still in love with those decade-old BA635s. (Is anyone making something half as good these days?)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/1145.....emachines.html (2004)
(Also, as to the original photo, damn that's a lot of CRT. Time to move up to 24"+ LCD, man, your eyeballs will thank you once the world stops looking curved inwards. And the >20W savings on the electric bill might subsidize it...)
Also still in love with those decade-old BA635s. (Is anyone making something half as good these days?)
Ah, didn't realize the point was the globe-hopping. It's ... more obvious / less remarkable? ... if you were around to watch the PC industry through the 80s to present, maybe. Taiwan (now in ever-closer collaboration with mainland China) had the bulk of manufacturing expertise throughout the - let's call it the "Wintel era," 486 to roughly_present - as well as the "commodity PC" chipset manufacturers (Via, SiS, etc...) - and most 'foreign' brands like Gateway relied on that resource heavily/exclusively for a decade or more when it came to the bulk of their products.
(Gateway in particular had some neat/insane side projects - management was very interested in (re)integrating the PC and TV*, and they even picked up the effort to resuscitate the Amiga 'brand' and design tradition somewhat tangential to that - but they always managed to miff on execution. I think they even beat Apple to trying the corporate-unified 'showroom' model near the end, but had neither the cachet or discounts to pull that off.)
*Previous efforts: The initial incarnation of the entire home PC era; Commodore CDTV and Philips CD-i, etc. Of course every game console ever supported TV output consistently, and the peculiar fork between broadcast and "VGA" resolutions and timings is what threw things off. Now that TVs have acceptable resolutions for "computer work" (probably to jump straight from 1080 to quad within the next product cycle) and everything has a common DVI/HDMI connection (or speaks IP) it's again a no-brainer, but combining broadcast content and spreadsheets on one screen was stupidly expensive for quite a while [unless you held the computer side to broadcast resolution and could just overlay, but by the x86 + Win 3.x era, everything made assumptions about having at least 640x480 to play in; Gateway's attempts relied on then-painful-expensive TV-sized VGA monitors and TV cards in the PC side, possibly before DMA to video RAM was even fully baked on the Intel platform].
So... all credit due, the question on everyone's minds for a long time before the eventual big failures and acquisitions [Gateway->Acer; IBM Personal Systems->Lenovo] was exactly what value the nameplates were adding other than a significant markup over "white box" cost and the original wave of preloaded crapware (previously and primordially, bundled software consisted of things users might actually want, like a word processor that wouldn't expire in 30 days, and cutting those deals with the likes of Lotus and Microsoft were one reason the US badges could compete in the game).
Of course, at the same time all of that was going down, Intel legally wrestled (an already wounded) Via out of the chipset market and AMD went and crammed a lot of that silicon into the CPU die for performance reasons anyway, so now the most expensive components in x86-land all come from "US-based" companies (AMD now care of whatever third-party fab anywhere has the best process this week) while the board layout and manufacture stays where it found its home. Everybody left standing seems vaguely content with that arrangement for now... while the more "interesting" business of phones and tablets is an entirely cosmopolitan tangle as to whoever has the best ARM by cost in quantity.
There's a fun story that goes around about one of the big Taiwanese brands getting its "start" when they "realized" they could sell product directly rather than to Dell, but that's probably apocryphal - there were plenty of non-US "IBM clones" in the US before Dell had even clearly established its position, usually with NEC V20s or V30s under the hood (and the one that lurked on my desk had some long-forgotten Japanese brand's nameplate, but I wouldn't put money on that being where the PCB was etched).
I also almost forgot that, as Asus's Wikipedia entry reminds, Intel was still sucking up to major US partners with exclusive head-starts well into the '90s - once they realized there was no reason left to, the playing field got so level that it could tilt right over in favor of the companies with the actual expertise (and most direct/discounted access to mainland manufacturing).
[Why yes, I am utterly obsessed with the history of this stuff, particularly the diversity that existed before... Microsoft kept demonstrating vaguely competent business acumen while letting their remaining competitors shoot themselves in both feet throughout the '90s. The phone and tablet universe is kind of fun, but with 3 or 4 dominant OSes and a form-factor stripped down to the bare 'touchscreen and enough thickness to carry the computing payload' minimum, it's still a far cry from the cambrian explosion of the 80s. Maybe wearables will start to make life interesting again...]
(Gateway in particular had some neat/insane side projects - management was very interested in (re)integrating the PC and TV*, and they even picked up the effort to resuscitate the Amiga 'brand' and design tradition somewhat tangential to that - but they always managed to miff on execution. I think they even beat Apple to trying the corporate-unified 'showroom' model near the end, but had neither the cachet or discounts to pull that off.)
*Previous efforts: The initial incarnation of the entire home PC era; Commodore CDTV and Philips CD-i, etc. Of course every game console ever supported TV output consistently, and the peculiar fork between broadcast and "VGA" resolutions and timings is what threw things off. Now that TVs have acceptable resolutions for "computer work" (probably to jump straight from 1080 to quad within the next product cycle) and everything has a common DVI/HDMI connection (or speaks IP) it's again a no-brainer, but combining broadcast content and spreadsheets on one screen was stupidly expensive for quite a while [unless you held the computer side to broadcast resolution and could just overlay, but by the x86 + Win 3.x era, everything made assumptions about having at least 640x480 to play in; Gateway's attempts relied on then-painful-expensive TV-sized VGA monitors and TV cards in the PC side, possibly before DMA to video RAM was even fully baked on the Intel platform].
So... all credit due, the question on everyone's minds for a long time before the eventual big failures and acquisitions [Gateway->Acer; IBM Personal Systems->Lenovo] was exactly what value the nameplates were adding other than a significant markup over "white box" cost and the original wave of preloaded crapware (previously and primordially, bundled software consisted of things users might actually want, like a word processor that wouldn't expire in 30 days, and cutting those deals with the likes of Lotus and Microsoft were one reason the US badges could compete in the game).
Of course, at the same time all of that was going down, Intel legally wrestled (an already wounded) Via out of the chipset market and AMD went and crammed a lot of that silicon into the CPU die for performance reasons anyway, so now the most expensive components in x86-land all come from "US-based" companies (AMD now care of whatever third-party fab anywhere has the best process this week) while the board layout and manufacture stays where it found its home. Everybody left standing seems vaguely content with that arrangement for now... while the more "interesting" business of phones and tablets is an entirely cosmopolitan tangle as to whoever has the best ARM by cost in quantity.
There's a fun story that goes around about one of the big Taiwanese brands getting its "start" when they "realized" they could sell product directly rather than to Dell, but that's probably apocryphal - there were plenty of non-US "IBM clones" in the US before Dell had even clearly established its position, usually with NEC V20s or V30s under the hood (and the one that lurked on my desk had some long-forgotten Japanese brand's nameplate, but I wouldn't put money on that being where the PCB was etched).
I also almost forgot that, as Asus's Wikipedia entry reminds, Intel was still sucking up to major US partners with exclusive head-starts well into the '90s - once they realized there was no reason left to, the playing field got so level that it could tilt right over in favor of the companies with the actual expertise (and most direct/discounted access to mainland manufacturing).
[Why yes, I am utterly obsessed with the history of this stuff, particularly the diversity that existed before... Microsoft kept demonstrating vaguely competent business acumen while letting their remaining competitors shoot themselves in both feet throughout the '90s. The phone and tablet universe is kind of fun, but with 3 or 4 dominant OSes and a form-factor stripped down to the bare 'touchscreen and enough thickness to carry the computing payload' minimum, it's still a far cry from the cambrian explosion of the 80s. Maybe wearables will start to make life interesting again...]
Comments