Dead Brands of Computing Past: Soltek | Hacker News Reader

Dead Brands of Computing Past: Soltek

cpushack.com

29 pointszdw9 comments

I had a Soltek board in my rig! Loved the purple coloring. https://www.flickr.com/photos/whalesalad/53131453482/

Here's a trip down memory lane: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whalesalad/albums/721777203106...

I also had a Soltek MB that worked very well with a Pentium III, but it was one with standard colors.

In the following years I thought that it was weird that the Soltek MBs have disappeared. Because I had been very content with the one that I had, I would have bought again Soltek MBs, but they were no longer available.

> company’s production facilities were based on the use of the latest SMT equipment, and the staff consisted of the most talented personnel in the field of computer engineering

Author only knows business park where head office was located, doesnt know any engineer names nor even where they manufactured.

>Consumer interest was captivated not only by the price of Soltek motherboards, but also by an extended set of interface capabilities of peripheral equipment, as well as a well-chosen set of utilities supplied in the kit

and as an example article uses low end 1999 socket 7 board with standard set of capabilities and peripherals

>organized several points of conveyor production of goods

>surprised the market from time to time with its innovative innovations

Two paragraphs about vibrancy of PCB colors on GeForce 4 MX 440 SE, absolute lowest of low ends in 2002 when released. Then even more about colors just to end at

>As it turned out, the process of creating motherboards in bright colors is extremely toxic

Article is filled with nonsense bloviation as if it went thru chatGPT or was a collection of machine translated Chinese press releases :( I was hoping to learn about the company, founders, ceo, business structure - did they sub contract manufacturing/design? This article has none of that, just a lot about pretty pcb colors.

> In 2005, suddenly, for no reason at all, an official press release appears, voiced by the head of the public relations department of Soltek, in which it appears in black and white: the Taiwanese company Soltek Computer Inc. stops mass production of motherboards and focuses all resources on the production of computer peripherals. After such a statement, analysts of the global information technology market unanimously stated that this statement is a death sentence for the brand and the company as a whole.

I feel there is some crucial background info missing - why would a successful mobo maker suddenly abandon the market?

Perhaps someone like Elon Musk wreaking havoc in Taiwan?

It could be that there was a process of consolidation starting. Soltek was a small player and for years I simply assumed they could not compete with giants like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, that were taking the hobbyist market. There was also ECS which was big in the OEM market, building boards for HP and the like. It could be they saw it coming that they would not exist in a few years, it might be that sales and profit were already going down. Just assumptions here, someone else might come along to confirm or deny this.

By the way, I bought a Soltek board in 2003 with the then new sata controller. I read the specsheet a bit fast... It said the sata port would do software raid. The pata port would do ata and software raid. Of course this turned out to be true :) Linux crashed too often during busy I/O with regular disks. So I had to buy a separate sata card.

Maybe it had something to do with Intel shutting out all competing chipset manufacturers? Maybe they figured they couldn't differentiate in a marketplace where you were forced to buy the Intel or AMD chips?

Soltek SL-75KAV was the first motherboard I've bought on my first salary! Was working great for 5 years or so before getting heavily outdated.

Same here! (Well, it wasn’t my first salary, but I bought it with my own money between high school and college, while everyone else was getting their parents to buy them their college PC.)

Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB RAM, pirated windows 2000, it was the first computer I ever built, and I learned Linux on it a few months later (RedHat 8, later Debian.)

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