On Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 3:11:28 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Wed, 30 Sep 2015 05:48:01 -0400, "Robert Green"
wrote:

"Don Y" wrote in message

stuff snipped

[I recall colleagues who bought "off brand (PC) clones" in the mid 80's
hoping to save a few bucks. And, the countless hours they lost when
things didn't quite work as they had hoped (hence the rice of the "100%
compatible" notion).]

I was a consultant back then and I built a 6 PC dBaseII data system that had
paralegals entering data abstracts on 4 machines nearly around the clock on
XT clones. Periodically I would sneaker net the abstracted data onto two AT
clones daily for searching. Couldn't have done it without the price break
the clones provided and didn't have any trouble running dBaseII and Wordstar
on those machines.

I had considerable help from VF associates and owner Tom Von Flandern and
his sons. (DC area computer geeks of the time probably know the name.) They
lived, breathed and ate clones and stocked what they thought were the most
reliable equipment. I spent 10's of thousands of dollars there. The only
dud I bought was a Tulin 40MB drive that crapped out very shortly after
purchase. Then, the company managed to go bankrupt while "servicing" my
dead drive.

I also managed to get a stack of new PC Jr half height 360K drives with an
IBM logo on the front to install in the machines I used in the abstracting
project. Since the only logo visible was "IBM" no one in a multi-hundred
employee law firm knew that they were clones.

I'll agree that the more esoteric the application, the more likely
compatibility problems would arise but I rarely saw them. I had legit IBMs
on site, but clones could be had for considerably less than the real thing.
After a while, I *preferred* clones because I could select what motherboard
I wanted from a selection of suppliers that also made boards for the Big
Boys. I ended up mostly with Asus motherboards in my machines because they
seemed the most reliable but I've used Tyan, Gigabyte, MSI and many more..

I am not sure that the PC revolution would have been as remarkable as it was
without the clones. They enabled a lot more people access to personal
computing than an IBM-only world would have.
I worked for 5 years for a small high-end clone mfg here in Canada -
the first PCs to be sold with a 3 year warranty.
They were really good machines, at a very competetive price, until a
beancounter took over the company with the help of a socalled "Harvard
MBA" - between the 2 they killed the quality and bled the company into
backrupsy within about 3 years. (I was gone in about 1 1/2)

What you described also killed Radio Shack. I left a corporation that had a feminazi running the human resources department. The company became riddled with AAM's,"Affirmative Action Morons" and the company was gone a year after I left. That's what happens when you put someone in a job for reasons other than the content of their character. o_O

[8~{} Uncle Radio Monster