Company Name: AST
Description: AST Research Inc. was established in 1980 by Albert Wong, Thomas Yuen and Safi Quareshey on a budget of two thousand dollars. The company name had been derived from the first letter of their names. The three actually drew straws to determine the positions each would be taking in the company. As it turned out, Quershey became company president, Yuen became the treasurer and Wong drew the post of secretary.
It was in 1981 that the first AST product was released. They were circuit boards employed in customizing personal computers such as an internal memory upgrade. The product had been well-received by the consumers and boost sales. The founders more than doubled-up their investment by reinvesting US$50,000 in the company to cover the ballooning demand for the company’s circuit boards. In 1983, sales for the product reached an estimated US$13 million.
Eventually, venture capitalists began to take an earnest interest in the company and an investment of US$2.4 million was made on AST Research Inc. AST began to offer stocks in 1984 and released two million shares by June of the same year.
Then in March of 1985, the AST Far East, Ltd. was established as AST’s first foreign subsidiary. It was put up in Hong Kong so that manufacture and distribution there could be monitored. The expansion of the company’s product range included Macintosh hard disk drives, graphic boards and adaptor boards.
Sales continued to rise and AST Research Inc. began acquiring other companies. It purchased Camintonn in March of 1986. Camintonn was a computer memory manufacturer. In May of the same year, AST bought the French computer wholesaler National System Company. By October of that year, AST Research Inc. introduced five computers that were IBM-compatible.
In an attempt to remain competitive in the industry, the company was reorganized in June 1988. The data communications and systems products groups were merged and later, the company developed an OS/2-based operating system that had communications programs.
The other founder Albert Wong left AST Research Inc. in 1988. The company had began encountering a number of problems with its innovation of computers. This was eventually remedied by enabling users to make modifications to computers by changing the parts of the circuit boards. It was also engaged in the development of computers that had a similarity with those of its competitors like NEC Corporation’s PC 9801.
In 1996, Samsung bought the company and three years later, the AST brand name and intellectual rights were bought by another company and was renamed AST Computers, LLC. The incarnation was established by the founder of Packard Bell Electronics, Beny Alagem. AST Computers was closed down in 2001.
During AST Research Inc.’s period of productivity, it manufactured a number of computers and components and even ventured into the production of notebook computers. A majority of the main products of AST had been high-density cards that were meant to replace the standard I/O cards intended for the PCs of IBM. Some of the typical AST cards that were released in the 80s included parallel printer ports, clocks, two RS-232 serial ports, optional mouse bus ports, 384Kb of DRAM, and a calendar.
The most prominent AST products that were released included the Mac286 computer, RAM that enables Macintosh machines to run the MS-DOS with an operating system that is already pre-existing, and NuBus cards that have Intel 80286 cards. The said products and brands had later been sold to Orange Micro. AST had also been involved in the manufacture and development of mobile servers and devices.
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