Rumour was they didn't pay their bills for a long time and the suppliers either stopped or would only do COD. When you can no longer get product, a retailer will fail pretty quickly.

Also something about over expanding too quickly.

I do wonder what happened to Anitec though, they just suddenly and quietly went away. Though NCIX did eat their lunch.

I remember when they shut down and sold everything off cheap, some dude bought their internal servers which still had piles of unencrypted customer data on it. He tried selling copies of it but iirc either the cops arrested him or just made him stop.

I feel the same way! I always feel mixed emotions when looking at old photos...

Unfortunately, the data including private employee and customer info was leaked, copied, and sold multiple times.

If you want to read more go search for u/exncix on reddit. Spills a lot of beans behind the why of the downfall of NCIX.

TLDR bossman got too big for his britches, did some shady accounting and started selling weird lifestyle/home appliance stuff, bad credit, lots of debt, expanded too fast.

to be fair when amazon started out it was just a bookstore for a long time. i remember when people started buying other things from there everyone thought it was kinda weird. now you buy subscriptions for your toothpaste on there. what a world.

Anitec went tits up too. That lao ban was like 5 feet nothing, this tiny little dude who hired a bunch of teenagers for cheap. I still remember when they layed me off, they were already downsizing and the market was turning bad.... i think that was when intel first released those core chips in the early 2000's. I had to go upstairs to talk to them and i was pretty sad after i got laid off.

shit, what a trip. From that shit hole, to driving a maserati a few years later and then home ownership in 2008. Christ, life is unpredictable.

Everyone I know who once worked at a local Vancouver computer store is baller AF. (A few of you here on this very forum.) :suspicious:

the only one that didn't go tits up are Frontier PC.
Patch (used to be at UBC) is probably no longer in business
I bought my first cpu from Generic (besides subway on broadway) - when sales were still on computer newspapers on weekly specials.
there was anitec, ncix, a power etc. even Memx came in and left.

Oh man, I used to look forward to The Computer Paper to see all the different ads for computer stuff. Good times.

A-Power is still around

I have no idea how they are still around but bought my first PC from these guys. I don't think the website layout has changed in decades.

ATIC Computers

Generic is still around too. Man I remember buying my 9800XT from them!

Looks like Addax Computer is also still around. I wonder if its the same inside where you go upstairs and its like all weird and carpeted.

A-Power was my other go-to.

Anybody remember The Computer Paper, i think it was called, where all these places would advertise in and they would have a price list of parts that would be updated weekly. Good times.

The issues with the 3.5" AOL demo floppy disks were gold. I think almost all my HS and first year Uni CS class assignments were handed in on reused AOL disks.

I wish I could remember the name, but my main store in the late 90's was one in Parker Place. ICI Computer I think?

When I started my hardware site I worked with them to borrow hardware to review in exchange for a banner on my site. One of the first things I tested was a really expensive double GPU video card from ATI that unfortunately sucked and I had to say so. After that I had to stick to coolers for a while (I was one of the first to review the Golden Orb which was a huge hit if you guys remember)

Being an honest, small sized hardware site was not a great business strategy as it turns out, but I was able to make it work for like 15 years. The real way to make money was to work in favor of the hardware companies, not the readers. Oh well.

^ What was your site? The only local thing that I remembered back in the day was SPCR.

wow, didn't know A-Power and Addax are still around

Think they moved to Yaohan. Last time I walked by, it looked empty/closed though.

HardCoreWare!

how is Atic still going? they had the worst rep, but they also had the best prices. I remember ordering parts was like ordering soup from the soup nazi. holy fuck. just to save $20.

I knew a lot of the local webmasters in Vancouver and around the world. They were much better businessmen than I ever was. I am kind of an engineer at heart, and I just wanted to learn and write about the hardware.

Looking back, I probably would have been much better off just working for one of those guys instead of doing my own thing.

I used to deliver computer cases from a warehouse in Richmond to a LOT of these places you guys mentioned lol. It was a minimum wage job but I had fun drifting in the delivery van with bald wheels and falling asleep in the warehouse when there was buttfuck nothing to do. The owner was some salty wet Taiwanese(?) guy and I found his stash of porn hidden on a shared company drive :lol

Eventually got laid off but oh well, started collecting EI instead. Ha!

Hopefully the collection wasn't... questionable... in any way

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews...source=twitter

Remember when Acuras could hold their own against the best Germany had to offer?

The 330ci cost more than 20% more and won the comparison against the CL Type S by only 1 point.

God. A good friend of mine passed away after two years of painful cancer treatment. He left behind a wife and a 3 year old kid. Incredibly thoughtful and generous guy. Heck of a father and husband, really cared for his family, and just everyone around him in general. Drove an ND, rode a GS - we used to ride in the mountains out in the Bay Area (met him through the work A Capella Club).

I didn't find out until I texted him to check in yesterday. Since he had relocated to LA and I had relocated to Toronto, we haven't seen each other in person for a while. His wife replied just now, and said he passed away last week. The end had come so quickly that he didn't have time to give her a list of people to contact.

It's like it's always the people who least deserve it, are the ones who have to go?

Sucks.