bit-tech.net | Where in the world?

It’s a wonderful process. We.sit, we read magazines and websites cover to cover, and we carefully choose our new computing purchases based on our needs and wants. We log on to our favourite e-tailer, pick out the products, enter credit card details and before we know it, the delivery man is round with a big box of love.

But do you ever stop to think about where this gear is actually coming from in the first place? Stop to consider that someone, somewhere, is getting excited about the 200 Radeon X1900s he has arriving in tomorrow to go out to his customers? That someone in California is raving about a new 64-pipeline GeForce he has designed, and is eagerly awaiting the first samples to land on his desk to he can begin to test the awesome power? That, as we sleep, production lines in Taiwan are turning out the motherboards that we’re going to be ordering in a month from now?

The internet and modern communications have clearly made the world feel a lot smaller. We can call or email someone, anywhere in the world, any time we like. But that doesn’t change the fact there are still different countries and continents where certain things happen and certain things don’t, and there are still areas known more for some things than others. China is a big hub for manufacturing, California is still the home of chip design, and Britain… well, Britain still has some of the best writers and journalists in the world. In our utterly unbiased opinions, of course.

So, we at bit-tech towers decided that we wanted to investigate exactly where all our favourite gear comes from and how it gets made. We embarked on a gruelling world tour to find the offices and the manufacturing plants of all the top companies that we cared about, and then put finger to keyboard to report back to you. Did you know that some of the top enthusiast components in the world are designed in Canada? That one of the most anticipated games of 2006 is being developed in the Ukraine? That one of your daily website reads comes out of Alaska? Thought not!

So then, dear reader, hope onboard the bit-tech private jet and buckle your seatbelt, as we take you on a whistlestop tour around the world technology economy. It might be a bumpy ride!

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Tech Musing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.