World Power Systems: Memory boards, big ads, great prices, non-existent
company. Some guy named "The Colonel" who of course wasn't. Magazine ads
on credit, graphic design for said ads on credit, prepayment from customers
never returned.
Not just in Byte magazine, also (at least) kilobaud and Interface Age, year
was 1978? Whole thing was blown by the editor of Interface Age, who was
suspicious and called to "do a story" on the company. When he showed up,
"The Colonel" was on the lam, and there was nothing but an empty office and
a phone.
An almost identical scam happened in, as I recall, 1979, when a company
placed multipage color ads for a bunch of really cool, inexpensive TRS-80
Model 1 peripherals in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, then disappeared.
And let's not forget Morrow, which, after changing names to Xibec (Xidec?)
and announcing & taking orders for some super doozy computer called The
General, also vanished overnight.
Kai
-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Ismail [mailto:dastar_at_ncal.verio.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 1998 3:26 PM
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
Subject: Re: World Power Systems scam
On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, John Foust wrote:
> Does anyone recall the month and year the "World Power Systems"
> scam advertisement appeared in (was it?) Byte?
What was the nature of this scam?
Sam Alternate e-mail:
dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Thu Oct 08 1998 - 17:49:35 BST