[conspire] NCA Computer Products (was: What's going on with Fry's Electronics?)

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> One of the dirty little secrets of hardware is provenance and grading.
> I won't point fingers, but certain vendors in the Valley historically
> were known for low prices but seemed to generate a lot of returns,
> leading to two speculations:  (1) Maybe their wholesale sourcing
> included a lot of 'seconds'.  (2) Maybe their RMA returns tended mostly
> to get re-shrinkwrapped and put back on the retail shelf instead of
> being returned to the wholesaler.  Retailers get rewarded for low
> wholesale-return rates with pricing.  The incentives tend to encourage
> poor quality practices.

Time to haul out a classic Silicon Valley horror from the 1990s:  NCA
Computer Products.  Every computerist in the Bay Area knew them, because
their prices drew us like moths to a flame -- and I'll freely confess I 
was a customer (only) for a hard drive, during a period when pretty
nearly every Linux activist in the Bay Area bought a hard drive there at
least once.

Here's something I didn't expect to find in 2019:  a mirror of their
1995 Web site:  http://resume.wizzard.com/w1995/NCA/index.html  See that
picture?  It's the headquarters building in Sunnyvale at 1202 Kifer &
Lawrence Expressway.  Today, that impressive building with the glass
front is Phoenix Real Estate.  In the photo, the main retail entrance is
that black maw in the middle.  Over to the right, right behind the dark
sedan, was the door to the separate service/returns department.

And that was the key.  If you were _really_ alert, you would notice that
during business hours, there was always a long queue out the
service/returns door into the parking lot, and you would stop and wonder
_why_.

If like me and most of my friends you weren't alert enough, there was a
significant likelihood you'd figure out why -- because your unit was
either generally no good or had unexpected limitations that were not
quite warranty failure but displeasing.

It's been so long, I can't rightly remember whether this example was my
experience or a friend's, but, say, you saw an unbeatable NCA deal on a
2.1 GB HP SCSI drive.  Clueless about the suspicious returns line, you
buy one in the main retail space, and take it home.  You try to add it 
to the SCSI chain with a couple of other SCSI drives.  It seems to
weirdly not register or timeout.  Huh?  You experiment a bunch using the
built-in utilities in your SCSI host adapter.  If you have it as sole
device on the SCSI chain, it's fine.  If you have all the other SCSI
devices on one SCSI chain, and an entire separate SCSI chain devoted
just to the HP drive, it's fine.  If you add it back to the main SCSI
chain but toggle off the performance-vital feature 'SCSI disconnect'
in the host adapter, it's fine.

I need to explain the latter:  One huge advantage of SCSI was something
called disconnect, whereby the host adapter issues a SCSI command to an
attached device but then moves on to other operations on the chain with
other devices ('disconnecting' from the first one and trusting it to
proceed without waiting for results), with the consequence that each
device could be active concurrently.  With IDE and predecessors, the
master and slave device on a chain could be active only alternately.
Concurrent operation was _really_ important to disk performance,
especially if you were running a multitasking, multiuser OS (like
Linux).  _So_, the notion of needing to lobotomise your SCSI adapter for
the benefit of a dodgy HP drive was pretty unattractive.

So, you call HP Warranty Service.  The nice person asks for your S/N,
you give it, and he/she says 'Oh, that's actually a Tandem Computers 
S/N, and is therefore covered by the warranty on your Tandem minicomputer
as part of the purchased bundle, if that's still under warranty.'  

WTF?  You don't have a Tandem Computers minicomputer, your surname not
being NASDAQ.  You hang up in confusion, do some research, and have a
dawning realisation:  The separate existence of Tandem Computers of
Cupertino ended recently (1997) when Compaq devoured it and then HP
Enterprise devoured Compaq.  Probably, a few years ago, Tandem ordered
(say) qty 500 of these 2.1GB SCSI drives, and either one of two things
happened:  (1) a minority of those drives failed to do SCSI disconnect
and so were deemed 'seconds' and fobbed off as grey market goods whence
NCA Computer Products picked them up at extreme discount, or (2) Tandem
actually didn't mind that _none_ of these drive units supported SCSI 
disconnect, and maybe got a great price for that reason, because it
intended them as sole-drive hard drives.  Later, Tandem (or Compaq/HP
sold excess inventory on the grey market, et voila.

Anyway, you trudge back to NCA Computer Products, and spend an hour
waiting in that long service/returns line.  The person behind the
counter points out that the drive isn't technically defective, exactly,
but that NCA offers what is called 'store warranty', which means you 
can exchange for another unit of the same model (no thanks) or
side-exchange for, say, a slightly more expensive 3.4 GB Micropolis SCSI
drive, kicking in $25 for the upgrade.  You go for that.  Maybe your new
(equally grey market) replacement will suck less.

And, if you had any common sense, that was your one and only purchase
from NCA Computer Products.  I think they took a couple of years to go
from high-flying to out of business.  ISTR they renamed themselves to
'NCA Peripherals' and then were suddenly 'poof' and gone.

They weren't the only culprit, and I'm sure there are plenty out there
today, but they were a famous 'This is why to be careful' example in
their day.
 
> If I need RAM, I'd be inclined to skip Fry's (and especially its
> sales) and buy from S.A. Technologies in Santa Clara
> (http://satech.com/), because they have decades of history doing The
> Right Thing and IMO taking chances with quality doesn't save enough
> money to be worth it.
> 
> 
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