W1B-019 Belfast business 3-3.txt
Dr M P Webb Lecturer The Queens University of Belfast Belfast Co. Antrim

12 May, 1994

Dear Dr Webb, We exhibited at the Academic Advice Road show last week, which I believe you also attended. I must say that we were surprised at the bias of academics against locally manufactured clone computers.

Typical comments were "Oh we have to buy IBM/Compaq/Apple or we can only deal with companies with a £ 10 million turnover".

To be fair we have seen this attitude in some large local businesses as well. But let me ask you, if you have a policy of buying American computers and thus exporting jobs who do you expect will employ your graduates? We now employ seven sales and technical staff on the clone side of our business.

It actually took a big American company to demonstrate that local clones do have merit over the big brands. Seagate Technologies (the world's largest producer of hard disks) gave us an order for one hundred clones when they set up their plant in L'Derry. We sent six machines to their HQ in Minnesota for tests before we won this order.

Clones are good value. They are totally upgradeable, even to Pentium technology. They can also be cheaper and easier to maintain because of the standard nature of the boards used.

Please reconsider. If you are interested in receiving information on our clones please let us know.

Yours faithfully, Daniel MacAllister
