Nick's NABU History Hijack 'A'

[Nick]

I'm pulling a DJ here, and for the same reasons. I have just a few tales to add a little to the already colourful NABU narrative.

With the appearance of the stash of NABU PCs and Adaptors on eBay, I am reminded of their early origins.

The original (what I would call Beta) units (both PCs and Adaptors), were assembled at the Almonte plant (previously Bruce Instruments). I can't recall how many of those we had assembled - might have been a few hundred. But, for the initial rollout to the test markets in Ottawa and Alexandria, we engaged an offshore manufacturer located in South Korea to produce 10,000 units.

I remember their representatives visited us in Ottawa and the Hardware Development Manager had asked me to host our two guests on a tour of the Almonte plant. I drove them out to Almonte and proudly showed them around the production floor, introducing them to several of the 50 or so employees that were assembling PCs and Adaptors at the time. We completed the tour and they graciously thanked me for my time and the opportunity to view the assembly process and pose a few pertinent questions to our production team. I will never forget their comment to me in the car on the return trip to Ottawa - "You should see our facility in Seoul - 10,000 employees, one location."

In the 1980's, the offshore company was little known to the average consumer, even though they manufactured many popular North American brand-name appliances. Today they represent about 15% of the South Korean economy and are a common name in consumer products - Samsung Electronics.

As a footnote, the 10,000 systems that they built for us, was to them a "pre-production run".

Stay tuned - I'll have more tales on the design efforts for the PCs and Adaptors in a later post.

[LeoBinkowski]

Wow that's a great story! I only heard pieces of it and I didn't know it was Samsung that built the units!

Good Times!

[allinretro]

Cool Story. So that was the only run of NABU's off-shore? Total of less than 11,000 units manufactured? 2200 of them ended up in the hands of PellMill.

[LeoBinkowski]

I believe Canada had a run of at least 20k Units. At least, that was consistent with the subscriber numbers and inventory I knew about.