ASUS was founded in 1989 in the Republic of China by TH Tung, Ted Hsu, Wayne Hsieh and MT Liao - all four were computer engineers from Acer. The current CEO and Chairman of ASUS, Jonney Shih, joined the company in 1994. According to the ASUS sales manager, Alexander Kim, the name ASUS originated from Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. The first three letters of the word were dropped to give the resulting name a high position in alphabetical listings.
In 2004, ASUS was reported to sell more motherboards than three other leading companies combined, reaching 30 million. This number, however, includes rebranding contracts.
In 2005, shipments from ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte, and MSI totaled 104.86 million units. ASUS led with about 52 million units, followed by ECS with 20 million, MSI with 18 million and Gigabyte with 16.6 million. MSI revised its motherboard shipments from an estimate of 16.7 million units to 18 million, according to the company.
In the early 1990s, Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers had not yet established their leading positions in the computer hardware business. Any new Intel processors would have been supplied to better established companies like IBM first, and the Taiwanese companies would be forced to wait for approximately six months after IBM received their engineering prototypes.
When the Intel 486 was released as engineering samples, ASUS decided to design its own 486 motherboard without having a 486 processor engineering sample on site, using only the technical details published by Intel and the experience they gained while making the 386 compatible motherboards. When ASUS finalized its 486 motherboard prototype, they took it to Intel's base in Taiwan for testing. Unsurprisingly, they were not formally greeted when they arrived. It turned out that Intel's own 486 motherboard prototype had encountered design flaws, and Intel's engineers were rectifying it. The ASUS founders exercised their experience with the 486 and had a look at Intel's malfunctioning motherboard. Their solution worked, to the Intel engineers' surprise. Intel then tested the ASUS prototype, which functioned perfectly. This marked the beginning of an informal relationship between the two companies - ASUS now receives Intel engineering samples ahead of its competitors.
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by punched cards. The series of cards could be changed without changing the mechanical design of the loom. This was a landmark point in programmability.
Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine using punched cards in the 1880s.
In 1833, Charles Babbage moved on from developing his difference engine to developing a more complete design, the analytical engine, which would draw directly on Jacquard's punched cards for its programming.
In 1835 Charles Babbage described his analytical engine. It was the plan of a general-purpose programmable computer, employing punch cards for input and a steam engine for power. One crucial invention was to use gears for the function served by the beads of an abacus. In a real sense, computers all contain automatic abacuses (technically called the arithmetic logic unit or floating-point unit).
His initial idea was to use punch-cards to control a machine that could calculate and print logarithmic tables with huge precision (a specific purpose machine). Babbage's idea soon developed into a general-purpose programmable computer, his analytical engine.
While his design was sound and the plans were probably correct, or at least debuggable, the project was slowed by various problems. Babbage was a difficult man to work with and argued with anyone who didn't respect his ideas. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand. Small errors in each item can sometimes sum up to large discrepancies in a machine with thousands of parts, which required these parts to be much better than the usual tolerances needed at the time. The project dissolved in disputes with the artisan who built parts and was ended with the depletion of government funding.
Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, translated and added notes to the "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" by Federico Luigi, Conte Menabrea. She has become closely associated with Babbage. Some claim she is the world's first computer programmer, however this claim and the value of her other contributions are disputed by many.
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