Can you say "inflationary"? I knew you could.

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Computer Reseller News, October 18, 1999

Component Aftershock Hits Channel

San Francisco - The hardware component market is awash with price surges and shortages in the wake of last month's devastating earthquake in Taiwan, and the channel is feeling the aftershocks.

Memory and motherboards are taking the biggest brunt of the impact of last month's quake, distributors, VARs and brokers said. Graphics cards and CD-ROMs also are in short supply, and major DRAM vendors have put their products on allocation (see related story, p.2).

Compounding the problem is year 2000, which is leading to something of a stocking frenzy.

"Prices are increasing across the board for every component out there, from cases to motherboards to memory," said Dan O'Brien, president of WorldWide Computers Inc., a white-box distributor based in Streamwood, Ill. "The only things not going up are processor prices," he said.

"We've seen pretty significant increases, almost entirely due to the quake," said Art Merkin, general manager and vice president of BLT Electronics, an open-market supplier of computer products based in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

According to NECX Direct LLC, a Peabody, Mass.-based open-market exchange for computer components, the spot price of a 64-Mbyte PC100 DIMM, a common memory module, shot up to $145 after the quake, from $107 before the disaster. The price recently leveled off at about $120...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), October 19, 1999

Answers

Given the number of small business who will be caught short next year, I'm tempted to stock up on a dozen cheap PC's myself. They will probably be worth a fortune by the first week in January.

But maybe I should just dup a bunch of copies of Win98 with Y2K patches, and a disk with a complete set of BIOS upgrades. Web sites, tech support lines and computer store shelves are all going to be unreachable/empty if a million small businesses suddenly try to upgrade.

-- You Know... (notme@nothere.junk), October 19, 1999.

Yep, if we were rich we'd stock up on iMacs. Worth their weight in gold in January 2000 :-)

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), October 19, 1999.

Computers .... Can't eat them in Janruary, AND, it the elictricity is OFF , you can't USE THEM ! If money is in short supply, who WILL BE ABLE TO PAY THE PRICE ??? Eagle

-- Hal Walker (e999eagle@freewwweb.com), October 20, 1999.