AST Research

AST Research, Inc., later doing business as AST Computer, was an American personal computer manufacturer. It was founded in 1980 in Irvine, California, by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey, and Thomas Yuen, as an initialism of their first names. Wong left the company nine years later, followed by Yuen in 1992, with Qureshey remaining until AST was acquired by Samsung Electronics in 1997.

The company began by making a circuit board for the IBM PC that boosted its memory storage. AST went public in 1984 and would be a manufacturer of boards and add-on expansion cards. By the late 1980s, it had evolved into a major personal computer manufacturer with its line of Intel i386 based PC clones, and it was the first vendor to announce an i486 PC. In 1990, AST released an NEC PC-9801 clone in the Japanese market, becoming the first American PC vendor to market an NEC clone.

AST had established itself as one of the known "alternative" brands of PCs in the United States while globally it had numerous plants and was one of the world's largest makers of personal computers. However, increasing competition and its difficulty to integrate the assets of Tandy Corporation acquired in 1993, led to it making major losses in the following years. Samsung Electronics purchased a stake in AST in 1995 and bought the company outright two years later, leading to co-founder Qureshey stepping down as CEO and chairman. Unable to recover and causing additional losses to Samsung, AST was de facto closed down in 1999 and its brand name and patents sold to a consortium led by Beny Alagem.