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

[Josef Grosch]

On 9/15/19 7:42 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> 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.

Oh, yeah I remember NCA. A bunch of sneaky underhanded bastards that
made used car salesmen look good. I got stuck on that return line once.
I was working at HP at the time and say what you want about HP but back
then they knew SCSI, they helped develop the standard.

After getting screwed at NCA I mentioned my experience trying to return
a disk that would not work to some guy at work, I kept getting a SCSI
bus reset error which made for horrible disk IO performance. I was
informed what was the deal with NCA and I never set foot in the place again.

Years later I found that POS disk in the garage and dissembled it for
the magnets which now hold postcards on my refrigerator. At least that
part of the disk worked.



Peace

Josef


-- 
Josef Grosch       |  Another day closer  |
jgrosch at gmail.com  |  to Redwood Heaven   |  Berkeley, Ca.