This is not much.... Just a 2 hour film, made by one of the most carismatic develloper of all time.
Such a cool guy. Musician, photographer and hardware plus software develloper.
Yes. He is the (nearly) one single man, responsible for develloping the Amiga 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI

Yup, the younger generations have no idea about the company Commodore, which once brought us the revolutionary Amiga, and before that ruled the world with the C64, the best-sold computer ever.
Even IBM may be going that route, since they sold their computer department to Lenovo. It's no longer a household name.
Atari, who remembers them?

Scali wrote:

Yup, the younger generations have no idea about the company Commodore, which once brought us the revolutionary Amiga, and before that ruled the world with the C64, the best-sold computer ever.
Even IBM may be going that route, since they sold their computer department to Lenovo. It's no longer a household name.
Atari, who remembers them?

I'm not talking about Commodore. I have a C64 in my house, and probably everybody does somewhere in the attic or cellar. I am talking out of the hundreds, if not thousands of different manufacturers, companies like DataExpert who may have only existed for a decade or so, leaving no legacy. Commodore left a legacy. They revolutionized and helped bring computing to the masses. Without Commodore the world may very well be a different, stupider place.

This is dedicated to the smaller, forgotten companies. Companies that are REALLY forgotten. Companies where if you have a thousand people, you would be very very lucky to get one person that knows about that company.

And most importantly, I find 0 mention of DataExpert of Wikipedia, there is no collected information resource for this company, which could be useful or interesting to some people.

Scali wrote:

Yup, the younger generations have no idea about the company Commodore, which once brought us the revolutionary Amiga, and before that ruled the world with the C64, the best-sold computer ever.
Even IBM may be going that route, since they sold their computer department to Lenovo. It's no longer a household name.
Atari, who remembers them?

Back then. Apple was nothing. They stood in the shadow of Commodore wich invented new technologies.
Dale Luck and Dave Haynie have said on numerous occations, that what they did, was to do things that
were not done yet for allmost every new machine. Yes. There were at least one to two new inventions
in each new machine. Today it is just recycled idea's and technologies.

Ampera wrote:

This is dedicated to the smaller, forgotten companies. Companies that are REALLY forgotten. Companies where if you have a thousand people, you would be very very lucky to get one person that knows about that company.

Commodore is/was such a company.

What about Vendex? About 20 years ago I was given a Headstart II system that came with dual 1.2MB 5.25" drives, Intel 8088, and no hard drive. It was a nice system, but I think even by 1996 Vendex was already long forgotten.

Computer Devices Inc. (CDI) - Burlington, Massachusetts.
I had one of their DOT portable systems that came with a built-in thermal printer, dual 720KB 3.5" drives, a 9" widescreen with 1050x??? resolution.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=116&st=1

Yea... funny thing is, we have a department store called V&D here, and they had 'Vendex' as their store brand. See this for example:

When the Vendex machines started to appear on the market, I thought they were their brand as well (not sure if they were sold via V&D themselves, but they were sold via Dixons, which was part of the V&D group here). But recently I found out that it was an international brand, and had nothing to do with the Vendex we know over here 😀

Ampera wrote:

DataExpert: Main Website (Internet Archive) http://web.archive.org/web/199702010801 ... rt.com.tw/ for the earliest archived ins […]
Show full quote

DataExpert:
Main Website (Internet Archive) http://web.archive.org/web/199702010801 ... rt.com.tw/ for the earliest archived instance
http://web.archive.org/web/200207191048 ... rt.com.tw/ for the latest archived instance.

I have no clue if they died after 2002, it's entirely possible, but I have no official information to go on.

DataExpert seems to be the company name of an electronics company along the lines of ASUS or MSI today.

I have an Unichip-based 486 motherboard made by DataExpert: UNI-486WB. It's generic as hell (as were many things of that time), no branding in the motherboard or manual. However the BIOS ID string indicates it was manufactured by DataExpert (1107).

In any case, its performance kind of sucks compared to the other VLB boards I have.

One that comes to mind:
Genoa Systems

Coincidentally, on a summer visit to my parents house, I found a Genoa VLB graphics card in my old room (I kind of remember buying it), then months later, a Genoa Systems 486 mainboard on Ebay that I bought for $39, including the DX2-66 cpu and 4MB 30-pin memory. It was in nearly mint condition and I run it today as one of two retro PCs I use regularly.

Quite a few of DataExpert's boards were also sold under the "Gemlight" brand, which may or may not have been somewhat related to another forgotten computer manufacturer, DTK.

Prairytech? These used to make (laptop) harddrives.

Does anyone remember Delta Computer? They used to make black-ish/grey computers... Pretty unique for the time. The computers were called Delta Gold.

One day they disappeared.

Cardiff Electric. 😀

One I'm fond of is "Ocean Information Systems" also known as Octek.

They sold PC systems and individual components for many years in the gold years of the PC market. I think they are relegated to either niche industrial status now, if not entirely defunct.

I always thought they made great motherboards as well decent commodity VGA cards.

QBiN wrote:

One I'm fond of is "Ocean Information Systems" also known as Octek.

They sold PC systems and individual components for many years in the gold years of the PC market. I think they are relegated to either niche industrial status now, if not entirely defunct.

I always thought they made great motherboards as well decent commodity VGA cards.

I remember Octek. I had an Octek Hippo DCA2 486 motherboard back in the day, complete with the "special sauce" RAM which they supposedly invented and nobody since has figured out what it was and how it worked. These days those modules are harder to find than an albino unicorn.

A defunct company whom I digged a lot of information about in the past year (even though it didn't register with me at all at the time they were still around) is QDI. Makers of motherboards from the 286-386 erat till about the early P4 era, after which they went under. These days it's pretty hard to get any info on their motherboards without some hardcore digging through the Internet Archive. Why have I done that? It turns out they are one of the few companies that perpetuated the SB-Link (AKA PC/PCI) into the P4 era, so you can get DOS sound support on Willamette and Northwood systems using QDI motherboards. I have to dig out all the info I have on them, and post it here. Most of it is already posted in my other threads about PC/PCI motherboards.

ATI Technologies. They never did or achieved anything. But only according to the nVidia chief's apparent recollection. 🤣

DataExpert/ExpertColor was a pretty decent sized cheaper brand of graphics cards, and even ATI/Nvidia based graphics cards, at least here in Europe until sometime around 2000-2005 IIRC. I'm probably mixing them with unrelated brands like CardExpert and PowerColor, etc. towards the end.

There's a million tech companies if your only standard is obscurity.

Media Vision is a pretty interesting one. They were an underdog with their ProAudio Spectrum sound card vs. Creative's Sound Blaster and various other media products in 1990-1995, and had they been better managed they might've become a titan with the 3dfx and Aureal engineers.

The video card of my first PC was a PCI ExpertColor with an AdvanceLogic chipset and 1MB of ram, surprisingly fast sometimes but with color corruption in some video modes and a lot of general troubles.

Cyrix 🙁

Their bringing down of the high priced x86 PC barrier is much appreciated but the company itself is much more forgotten especially since the VIA acquisition.

Dayna, they used to make networking stuff