Actually, to LEGALLY sell the case, the case had to be FCC approved. So did the power supply, and the motherboard, and the hard drive controller, and the video card, etc.
And even a system assembled from ALL fcc certified parts could not LEGALLY be sold, because the whole system needed to be approved. EVERY combination a company wanted to sell nneeded to be tested and approved. I know, because the company I was part of for 5 years spent 10s of thousands of dollars getting the systems we built approved - and then on top of that we spent another hundred grand or more getting ISO9000 certification so we could sell to government agencies.
The idiot MBA who "took over" the company started substituting parts on builds to "save money" - rendering the DOC (canadian) and CSA certifications void -------.
Back then if the IBM CE had to have access to the secure area we had to remove the printer ribbons just in case he was a Russkie spy with a lot of time on his hands to try to patch together the ribbon strikes.
iirc, the Iranians learned if you let people with thumb drives near your air-gapped system your centrifuges tend to rev up to 9 million rpm and go boom.
As I recall the Sovs built a device that allowed them to drop a used IBM Selectric ribbon in the machine and get a printout of everything that had been typed. The only problem is that spaces weren't recorded on the ribbon and had to be guessed at.
The Sovs learned something like that when one of their oil refineries exploded after they had stolen refinery control software that had been specially modified by the CIA to allow one of the holding tanks to be stoked to an 'impossible to contain' pressure. It was a huge explosion.
I saw a piece about how easy it is to get a company employee to insert a compromised CD or USB stick into the company's network. The people running the test just left them in sealed envelopes around the building at tables and in the restrooms that were marked: "Salary information for Company X executives."
Nearly ALL CDs and USB sticks so marked found their way to the company's network. It was well above 90%. Such information was apparently just too much for curious minds to ignore given the way some companies treat their exec salaries like State Secrets. My wife has to take classes every year now about how to recognize social engineering attacks because they have been used so successfully. It's thought the recent huge breach that exposed the personal data of so many Federal workers began as a social engineering attack.
The game just keeps goingm, though. It turns out that when they closed off the USB ports, snoopers just inserted keystroke recorders and picked them up later.
I'm always amazed at how many PCs I come across in the business and medical world that are incredible insecure and vulnerable to all sorts of attack vectors. I have to overcome my temptation to unplug card readers, printer ports, network ports, etc. Most PCs are not designed to offer any way to lock down input and output cables. I suspect somewhere in the country at any given time, a lot of information is being siphoned off by skimmers, recorders and various forms of vampire taps.
Speaking of recovering things from carbon ribbons, my Brother Fax uses a huge, page-wide roll of carbon film upon which every fax ever sent or received is immortalized in negative form on the ribbon. No (not very) complex reconstruction of keystrokes is required. Just holding the ribbon to the light will do.
I really can't remember the world before Google and the Internet. Where did we look things up? I know I used to go to the library at least once a week before the Internet and I haven't been back in years.
Today I bought a little body cam. It's a clip on camera that records in HD to a 32Gb micro SD card that makes very professional looking videos and it's no bigger than my thumb. I remember the summer I interned for WABC TV that the cameras we used were the size of cinder blocks and weighed nearly as much and they couldn't even record in HD.
I never saw FCC certifications on anything but parts that were clearly used for RF transmission or attachment to the POTS lines.
So in your case, it's the buyers that really ran the show and who probably wouldn't have bought your machines without certification. Lots of customers weren't so picky.
For me the simple equation was that selling clones them made it a business but assembling them for personal use made me a hobbyist.
Besides, in those days of people using illegal amplifiers on their CB radios, it was clear the FCC didn't (and probably still doesn't) have the resources to investigate, fine and confiscate the illegally boosted CB radios. So they weren't going after clone builders like me and IIRC, they didn't go after ANY clone makers that I ever heard of.
The same clone builders around the DC area advertised for years and years and only one, the guy I got my parts from, didn't sell assembled machines for the reasons you mentioned. But he did always have a line on the latest and greatest video card.
I find it amusing how much progress was made in the PC world because of gamers and overclockers. I knew gamers that got the new, latest and greatest video cards every few months and even brand new PC's when the new video cards required a new type of slot their machines lacked.
That's called "leadership" and your MBA was leading your company to the promised land of Bankruptcy just east of the River Jordan. (-"
Used to be FCC or DOC on all computer compnents. I've got CD drives with FCC certs on them I haven't built a clone in almost 10 years, and it.s been 26 years since I was in the computer "manufacturing" business.
I still hit the library regularly to pick up mind rot but I haven't done any serious researching there in years unless I was bumming the wifi.
I take that back. Last week I was looking for a book by Celine. I was having a senior moment and couldn't come up with a first name. A search of the catalog turned up about 40 pages of Celine Dion who I was pretty sure wasn't who I was looking for. So I wandered over to the reference section and eventually found an encyclopedia of literature that soon informed me I was looking for Louis-Ferdinand, the pen name of Louis Destouches. Back to the catalog search. No Louis-Ferdinand in the entire system so I bought the damn thing from Amazon. They only had the one I wanted in paperback, not Kindle, so I had to wait two days for it.
It's not only looking things up, it's getting things. I try to buy local but this town isn't a huge market and the merchants can't afford to have every odd gadget in stock. I've even had people tell me 'No we don't have so and so but we can order it. Or you probably can use your computer just as well as we can.' In one case, I was trying to buy a car radio for a new model. They couldn't come up with a dash kit even after I gave them the part number. Back to Amazon, and I had the dash kit and radio in a couple of days. Then there was the web site with photos and detailed instructions on how to rip apart a Toyota dash to install the radio.
There's nothing more important than keeping the customer satisfied. Even if you've got a jerk of a boss that doesn't understand how important customer satisfaction is, you can't lose sight of it. I had a boss who inherited me (didn't hire me and came along long after I was hired) and really worked hard to get me to leave.
Fortunately one of my clients knew his direct supervisor and told him how happy they were with my work. I had converted a system of nearly 100 complex Lotus spreadsheets to dBaseIII database that didn't mix data with formulas.
In huge spreadsheets people were always inserting rows and columns and deleting or seriously compromising formulas linked to those cells. I don't think a single sheet came with any sort of comments or documentation. It took quite some time to figure out what was happening. It had evolved over
5 years and the original "designers" were nowhere to be found.
Converting spreadsheet "systems" to databases was a lucrative business for a long time because so many small companies started out using spreadsheets when they should have set up databases. They all reached a point where the puny PCs of the time just ran out of memory. That spurred a lot of people to change over from Lotus 123 to dBaseIII.
Then dBaseIV came out, got killed by FoxPro which was eventually chopped up, folded into Access and killed. *Despite* MS's frequent promises to FoxPro user groups not to kill it. I still have quite a few FoxPro installations still running smoothly.
- as a source for "free" rental DVD's (we don't watch broadcast/CATV; just "movies" or "series" off DVD)
- reference city/county data (researching property taxes, etc.)
- reference texts available via ILL (some titles: _Pai Gow Poker_, _From text to speech: The MITalk System_)
- research papers usually only available through "subscription" services ("A Simple Method of Computing the Input Quantization and Multiplication Roundoff Errors in a Digital Filter")
- scant few titles that I'd never want to have to keep on my own shelves (we've been actively ridding ourselves of books/paper for the past 20 years -- let the *library* keep a copy of the latest NEC, CRC, etc.)
It's been a while for me too. I switched to all laptops because a) the power savings were substantial and b) the laptops are all the same configuration meaning I can take a Ghost backup from a dead laptop and easily reload it onto another machine. When I was using clones, each was subtly different from the other making restores to anything but the drive the backup was made on would fail.
I'll be going through all my old XT/AT parts to trash them this week so I will be able to review which items have FCC certs. I would suspect that hard drives, CDs and other items from name manufacturers have FCC IDs but I would be surprised if I see their mark on anything else.
That's a good point. Eventually there were lots of programs like MemTest and SANDRA that could give you a pretty good idea of how compatible a clone was likely to be. We switched from IBM to Compaq when Compaq pulled ahead in the MHz race. Compaq machines were built like tanks. Not anymore. )-: Thank Carly for that.
I buy desktops 25 at a time for the application where I have a lot configured the same (production floor), and 7 to 9 at a time for the other office, where we are aiming to replace all computers on a rotating 4 year schedule. The last 3 batches have been close enough to identical that an image from one works on the next. Been using high end Acers (Veriton M46 series - 4618, 4620, and 4630 over the last 3 or 4 cycles) Also using the same Acers for office machines at the factory, replacing a mixed bag of clones, Dell and MDG crap. On the plant floor we are using refurbed Lenovos.
I've had 3 motherboard failures in the last batch of Acers at the plant - 4 hard drives over the last 3 years or so at the insurance office. Other than that the Acers have been VERY good.
The first batch of Lenovos, with XP Pro, purchaced at 3 years of age 4 years ago, have been failing at an accellerated rate the last 6 months or so (Old P4s) so we just got 25 matching Core 2 Duo machines on Win7Pro. The first batch replaced MAI terminals - mostly P4s but a handfull of Core 2 machines as well. The Core 2 machines have been rock solid - the P4 machines are suffering from swollen electrolytic capacitors - Lenovo got hit with the fake electrolyte "flu" like so many others - but the problem was cured before the Core 2 machines. came on line.
Deploying the 25 machines will keep me busy for a few weeks of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons - - - - -. I've got the software all installed
- set up one machine then cloned the other 24 - so it will just be setting up machine names, configuring the user, and getting them onto the network.
When Compaq bought Packard Bell their quality took a big hit that they never fully rebounded from - and when HP bough Compaq, the same thing happened to HP. Their high end stuff may still be pretty decent, but they've "watered down the brand" with all their consumer grade junk.
Any one worked on mainframes like super computers? PCs and Windows is not all. Disappointed. Never worked on Hexadecimal ALU, stuffs like that? hard coax data transmission(not optical fiber). Computer manufacturing? Really? More likely it was assembly plant.
Virtually all "computer manufacturers" are only assembly plants today. We actually had certain printed circuit boards designed and manufactured to our exclusive specs, as well as some of our cases - and in the early years - the "good years", consistancy was very good.
After the beancounters took over it was just a clone assembly shop and I was soon gone.
We called them Word and Data DEFECT. At the precise time when competition entered the market, they chose to get stupid. Not good.
After the Lotus copy debacle the IT folks decided that anyone who wanted to run CP software had to product written justification and while some did, most did not. One very bad experience with CP made a lot of IT managers very wary of such software. It's an example of punishing the wrong people (the legit end users) for the crimes of others (thieves). Worse, still, there wasn't one CP program I knew of that couldn't be breached, often by running a small program that stayed in memory that convinced the program the original CD was in the player.
The death of WordStar is an even more fascinating story and a cautionary tale that execs and "vulture" capitalists should not treat programmers as fungible dirt.
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