In 1992, who launched the first Chinese home PC on the market? This issue was once controversial. Some people think it is Lenovo, the largest local computer manufacturer at present, some people think it is Great Wall Computer, the first domestic company to get involved in the computer field, and some even think it is AST, a famous computer brand in the early 1990s.
Today it seems that the first real home PC should belong to Lenovo. There is a little story here.
As early as five years before the birth of the home PC, Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi was considering whether the future direction would be to manufacture large computers or minicomputers? At that time, most people's opinion was to build mainframe computers. After all, most of Lenovo's technical staff came from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which had been engaged in the research and development of mainframe computers for many years. But Liu Chuanzhi realized that the future Chinese market would definitely be for personal minicomputers, and research and development of personal computers was the way to go. This idea became the germination of the later Lenovo home PC.
In early 1992, after careful consideration, Lenovo was the first to launch the concept of home computers in China. This was Lenovo's "1+1" computer product. At that time, Lenovo was still a small company with limited production capacity. I still remember that at the end of 1993, a reader Xie Hongzhang said when describing the hot topics of that year: "In some computer stores on Zhongguancun Electronic Street in Beijing, the sales of home computers have skyrocketed. There are queues of people just waiting to buy Lenovo 1+1 computers. Hundreds of units were sold. Lenovo 1+1 computers were in short supply in the market. In May, 2,000 units were shipped, and they were sold out in two weeks. In June, 3,000 units were launched, and they were sold out in less than two weeks. Some users simply took their money with them. I drove to the factory gate and waited to pick up the goods."
Following Lenovo, computer companies such as Wangma, Haihua, and Northland successively launched a number of home computers. Home computer stores are also popping up. In 1996, Lenovo was the first to launch the "10,000-yuan Pentium Computer Popularization Storm", using the concept of multimedia to promote home computers, which brought about the first climax of the development of home PCs. During this period, Great Wall, Founder, and Tongfang successively entered the field of home PCs and became major domestic computer brands.
By this time, China's home PCs had truly begun to develop on a large scale and become a huge industry. Company story: Three milestones in the history of home PC development