I've only encountered their CD drives before, but the one I had was a bulletproof beast. I had a CDD-620 that came in my first "real computer" (an IBM PS/Valuepoint retrofitted with a 486DX4), and it hung around, moving from one system to another for quite a while. I finally gave it to a roommate to resurrect an old Mac in about 2010 or so and it was still working then. Great piece of hardware.

I have one of their CDD-1020 drives (10x IDE).

If you want you can write a collected repository of all that info and I will add it to the forum post.

My first CD-Rom drive was from Wearnes. And the list of CD-Rom drives is not complete as I noticed. I used to have the CDD-110, a double speed cd-rom drive whit it's own ISA interface card. Funny thing was that you simply could pull the cd-tray out by hand, because the tray had a little curvature.

I remember the brand here in Oz, was a clone maker as well.

Just dug up a review of a 386SX machine from 1991, unfortunately there isn't a clear pic of the whole machine available

Thanks to all for replies.

Ampera wrote:

If you want you can write a collected repository of all that info and I will add it to the forum post.

I want but my English is so bad.

Roman78 wrote:

My first CD-Rom drive was from Wearnes. And the list of CD-Rom drives is not complete as I noticed. I used to have the CDD-110, a double speed cd-rom drive whit it's own ISA interface card. Funny thing was that you simply could pull the cd-tray out by hand, because the tray had a little curvature.

Here i found detailed inspection of the PCB of the Wearnes CD-110 rebranded as Orchid CDS-3110. Ant the Sony CD-ROM interface card:
http://matthieu.benoit.free.fr/107.htm

And Manual:
http://matthieu.benoit.free.fr/pdf/CDS-3110.pdf

A few Wearnes PC cases. Last one is Pentium era and has 12X CD-ROM unit.

kixs wrote:

A few Wearnes PC cases. Last one is Pentium era and has 12X CD-ROM unit.

Wearnes VGA PRO II

A keyboard with Cyrillic letters

jp3149 wrote on 2017-03-20, 18:46:

kixs wrote:

A few Wearnes PC cases. Last one is Pentium era and has 12X CD-ROM unit.

Wearnes VGA PRO II

Here's a box for the VGA II Pro card. I just got the empty box with some other, unrelated hardware, so no picture of the card itself:

I remember seeing the name often enough in the magazines in the 90s, they had things in for review from time to time. It gave me the impression of being spendier pro-sumer type stuff, SCSI etc. But what never happened to me, was coming across it in the wild, either in stores I shopped at, or at fairs... though I might have some vague recollection of being floored at the price a guy wanted for a 2 drive expansion box with dual or quad speed drives in in the late 90s, "It's got wearnes" well feed it some Wearning powders or something, jeeze. I think he wanted like $200 or so when other junk like that was $10 by then, new 24X drives for $40. So apart from that, didn't see anything "around".

The keyboard is made by BTC, recognisable by its slightly wider Esc key.

To answer the question in the subject, one sound card they made was the Beethoven ADSP-16, previously discussed here, based on the Analog Devices Personal Sound System chipset and similar to the Orchid SoundWave 32 and Cardinal DSP16.

Wondering if all their stuff was badge engineered, in support docs for other things, seemed their CDROMs were referred to as Okanu-Wearnes or something like that. Something beginning with O, who might have been their Japanese supplier, sounded Japanese.

Some of it is, their mice are also made by BTC. The ADSP-16 is likely a reference design (it doesn't even have the name or model silkscreened) since the drivers are just reference drivers from Analog Devices. They sold a VGM-1415W 14" monitor (1024x768 interlaced) that was a rebadged Samsung SyncMaster 3.

A capture of wpinet.com.sg from 2001-03-31 says "Wearnes Peripherals International is a joint venture between Wearnes Brothers Limited Corporation and Taiwanese giant Winbond Electronics". Then on 2001-06-03 it changed to "a joint venture of Singapore WBL Corporation and Taiwan Behavior Technology Corporation (BTC)" and claims to "design and manufacture optical storage devices" so at least the optical drives appear to be their own design.

I have a 386 board with an Austek cache controller from them.

(I populated i387 myself, but I'm unsure if it is compatible.)

I also found this motherboard from them on the internet
https://web.archive.org/web/20240521022826/ht … /wearnes-pa1116

I found this machine at an electronics junkyard a few days ago. A simple 386 clone.