AST Research

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AST Research, Inc. was a personal computer manufacturer, founded in Irvine, California in 1980 by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey and Thomas Yuen. (The name comes from the initials of their first names.) AST's original business was the manufacture and marketing of a broad range of microcomputer expansion cards, later focusing on higher-density replacements for IBM's standard I/O cards in the IBM PC. A typical AST card of the mid-1980s would have two RS-232 serial ports, a parallel printer port, a battery-backed clock/calendar (the original IBM PC did not have one), perhaps a bus mouse port, and 384 KB of DRAM (added to the 256 KB on the motherboard to reach the full complement of 640 KB).

As PC manufacturers improved the integration of peripheral controllers on their motherboards, AST's original business began to dry up, and the company developed its own line of PCs, for the desktop, mobile, and server markets. In 1991 AST became a Fortune 500 company.

AST Research was acquired by Samsung on August 11, 1997. In January 1999, the name and intellectual property were acquired by a new company named AST Computers, LLC.

[edit] AST Computers, LLC

AST Computers, LLC was a private company founded in 1999 when Beny Alagem, founder of Packard Bell Electronics, bought the name and intellectual property of AST Research, Inc.

AST Computers disappeared from the market in 2001.