Quantex

» see quantex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nobody I knew bought a computer from a catalog. In Turkey through the nineties and well past them, a PC came out of a shop in a computer bazaar, assembled in front of you from parts you had picked off a printed list, and the list itself was the social object. You posted it in your forum signature on donanimhaber and people argued with it. The American habit of phoning in an order for a finished branded machine and waiting for the box did not exist where I was, so the whole category Quantex lived in is one I know only from magazines.

Quantex Microsystems started in 1984 in Somerset, New Jersey, founded by Min Yau Chang, and sold direct. No stores. You called or you mailed the order and the machine arrived built. Through the second half of the nineties it carried a specific reputation in the US computer press: brand-name components inside and prices under the companies spending the most on ads.

The reputation belonged to Quantex and the factory did not. Fountain Technologies built the machines, and Fountain also built the Pionex and CyberMax lines. One production line, several badges on the front, and a single point of failure that none of the badges controlled.

~ the case file ~

~ the closed page ~

Fountain filed for bankruptcy protection in August 2000 and Quantex filed on 17 August with it. The European arm in Stevenage kept trading on its own for several months and closed during 2001. A separate outfit calling itself Quantex Computers UK Ltd. started advertising that year while denying any connection to the old company.

quantex.com had been a working catalog since February 1997. On 7 December 2000 the entire domain was 433 bytes. The title read Quantex - Closed. The body was one table stretched to the full height of the window with one image centered inside it, logo.gif, ninety-six pixels by eighty-four. No sentence and no address for anyone holding a machine still under warranty. The product catalog was gone and the logo was the only thing left standing on the domain.

~ not back in business ~

Four years on, the domain was still answering and still about the death. The page captured on 11 December 2004 was built in Microsoft FrontPage 5.0 and titled "Quantex Computer Company is not back in business." It opened with *** ATTENTION *** in bold, repeated the denial underneath in case anyone had missed it, and then sent people with a broken Quantex to AmazingTechs.com, an Invision Power Board forum where owners were keeping each other's machines running.

Four years after a bankruptcy, the brand's own domain existed to put down a rumor that it had come back. That is a strange job for a dead company to be doing, and somebody was paying the registration to keep doing it.

~ the parking lot ~

Today quantex.com answers 200 to anything that asks, which is the shape that fools an automated liveness check. The body is 114 bytes of JavaScript that throws the browser at /lander. The identical 114 bytes answer on other dead brands' domains, so it reads as one parking operator's fingerprint rather than any sign of life. The last page quantex.com wrote in its own voice was that 2004 denial.

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