3TH Ltd Information

We sold, far and wide - Europe, Africa, The Falkland Islands, even expeditions to the Antarctic and built up a customer base of thousands for our specialist component mail-order business. We had to develop our skills in integrating the many and varied oddball configurations our customers wanted to put together, had to provide lashings of hardware and software support to help users get things going, had to build up the skills that allowed us to fault-find the weird situations our customers got into on the other side of the phone and the other side of the world. We had to be really fussy about the PC components we bought as well as getting a grip of the vagaries and typically lousy quality dished up by the players in the PC industry. Surprisingly we also needed to build up significant mechanical skills in order to produce some of the special cases our customers also wanted. In order to check out the fancy server a customer was trying to build in a lab on top of a mountain thousands of miles away we found we really needed to try the Novell or UNIX software they were going to use with their motherboard. We loaded the software in the workshop, checked it all worked OK and then wiped the hard drive (if they were buying one) before shipping out the system -all so that we could be sure the customer would get things working. This give us a unique understanding of the interaction of hardware and software. For many years we sold PCs and servers in part built form to many large organisations. After a time a particular customer would get fed up with wielding a screwdriver, succumb to the marketing hype of a major PC vendor and would stop buying from us. A year or two later they would be back. A typical scenario was that they had tried to fit a tape drive to the COMPAQs they had bought last year, they needed special mounting rails and COMPAQ would only sell the rails with the tape drives - at a price 50% more than the normal price. What they wanted was a nice standard reliable 3TH PC - but did not want to build it all ...