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I bought my first computer made-to-order from a company called Micro Express (hence the badge on the case) in 1999. I also ordered parts from them in 2002 for my Windows XP build that I'm tinkering with now. I can't find them anymore. All other computers I've built have been mostly sourced from Newegg.com.

QBiN wrote:

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.

I was pretty sure that all they did was move the SRAM from the motherboard to the SIMM module, but they did it in a sneaky way to make it appear as if they had invented a revolutionary type of DRAM. This may have been the product that killed the company. I agree they made nice stuff though. I'm a fan.

I'll add another company to the list. How about DTK? I think they kind of, sort of still exist, but they more or less vanished off of North America sometime in the late 90s. They were a little more than a generic whitebox PC company, because they had their own BIOSes, motherboards, expansion cards etc...more along the lines of Everex. Strangely they have no wikipedia entry.

I still have 486 motherboard manuals from a couple of long-forgotten companies: VEGA and Amptron. I wish I still had the boards themselves. 🙁 If anyone wants, I can post photos, but I'm sure they can be found in PDF format with enough Google-fu.

Amptron? Aka PCchips?

Oak Technology, 'famous' for me because of their graphics chips and the OAKCDROM.SYS driver 😀

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Technology

My first PC had a Kalok harddisk. Who remembers them?
Or what about Iomega? With their Bernoulli Box, Zip and Jaz drive?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Amptron? Aka PCchips?

I don't know. Here's a couple of google hits:
http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486vlb3/m912v17.htm
http://th99.classic-computing.de/src/m/A-B/33259.htm

And here's exactly what my manual looks like:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/486-DX-6900-Universal … HUAAOxyuaFSMS9w

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Oak Technology, 'famous' for me because of their graphics chips and the OAKCDROM.SYS driver 😀

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Technology

Ooo. Oak Technology.

My 486 runs the CD1.sys version of the driver.

But either way it needs to be made clear, this is for companies that have fallen off the face of the planet. Within retro groups, Commodore is incredibly well known. It's not a household name as it used to be anymore, but it's by no means forgotten.

DataExpert WAS a forgotten company by all means. There is no WIkipedia mention, nor any other place where I can view a page full of information on them. Even Oak has a Wikipedia page since almost every DOS installation with a CD drive use their driver. This is for the companies that for some reason or another, fell off the face of the earth without any place saying exactly why they did, or who they were.

I am continuing on with Data Technologies/DTC. They are a bit more obscure, so it's gonna take me a bit to get info. And I am happy people are suggesting topics, but the rule here is make sure you can't get everything you would want to know in one location, like a Wikipedia page. That just makes what I do here redundant. And if you want to write your own entry, just follow the general citation style I use. and plop one down. I reject no decent post.

Scali wrote:

My first PC had a Kalok harddisk. Who remembers them?
Or what about Iomega? With their Bernoulli Box, Zip and Jaz drive?

If people have forgotten Iomega, what about Syquest?

I bet many modem brands are also long-forgotten... such as US Robotics or Hayes.

Scali wrote:

I bet many modem brands are also long-forgotten... such as US Robotics or Hayes.

I remember them.

And as I said. I mean forgotten in the sense of, nobody has a direct repository of information all in one place. I, as far as I am aware, have the first collected set of information regarding DataExpert.

There are quite a few.
One I really regret is Iwill, which has been acquired by Flextronics around 2007 and vanished afterwards. 😢
For the Dutch people it was Tulip who was a big name in the golden days of the computers.

I can name a few others that did exist in computing and now hardly are remembered:
- NEC (lovely NE2000 network cards)
- DFI for it's motherboards
- Harris
- Miro (well build graphic cards for it's time)

USR is still around, apparently, although a husk of their former selves. Hayes was left behind in the 56k era and is now dead. Rockwell became Conexant which after some turmoil appears to have survived for the time being. I'm not sure who got Motorola's telephony chipset people, and Lucent ultimately ended up with Nokia (not the one which was eaten by Microsoft).

Anybody remember Supra modems?
http://ftp.bestdata.com/dedmy/index.php?file= … ases&iPressId=2

There are countless hardware manufacturers that rode the crest of the wave in the mid-90s when the Pentium-driven PC boom happened. Take a flick through any issue of InfoWorld from those times to see companies that, indeed, dropped off the face of the planet. But even manufacturers like Zeos and Ambra have Wikipedia entries, so I'm guessing they don't count. The question is: how many of these forgotten companies are worth gathering information on? Sure, there are obscure devices and gadgets that are interesting to read about because they were weird or are now rare, but a forgotten company generally isn't interesting unless they made something that is rare and interesting. There are too many companies that did nothing special and just made clones of clones, unremarkable motherboards and the like.

Hi Ampera,
DataExpert (or Expertcolor or ExpertSound) is still in my memories. Not for cheap S3 graphic cards which were widely available in my country. But for Sound Cards.
ExpertColor was one of few companies which produced sound cards with AMD InterWave (advanced version of Gravis Ultrasound GF1 chip).
And their MED3201 card was probably the only card with Interwave LC chip in stores.

I loved and hated ExpertColor. When i wanted buy MED "GUS" from second hand i found dozens od their MED3931 cards. Cards were red (favourite GUS color) but with cheap and uninteresting OPTi 931 chip. After long searching i finally found MED3201 card with InterWave.
And found card chip is with InterWave LC and no possibility for RAM upgrade and for Gravis Ultrasound compatibility. Web sites and stores at the time listed card with am78c201 InterWave but in reality most cards were with am78c200 InterWave LC. Now i´m happy for rarity.

This is my favorite DataExpert, ExpertColor product. ExpertSound MED3201 sound card:

source: http://archiwum.allegro.pl/oferta/karta-muzyc … 6115459695.html

And mucm more common card, MED3931 with Opti Chipset:

source:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Expert-Color-MED3931- … t-/181471306415

Cool.

Eureka! I have located the website of Data Technologies Corp. New entry should follow within an hour or so.

New entry added.