PC vendor viability, or whatever happened to hitech international?

Shakeouts in the personal computer field: we're supposedly right in the middle of one now—but then, that's been said every couple of years. Nobody really likes to find that the maker of his or her PC has disappeared. When we hear cries of vendor shakeout, we wonder whether our vendor will be one of the victims—and how to predict who will survive and who will die. The author goes through the pages of PCMagazine since September 1985 to see who's become nationally visible and what's happened to them since. The raw numbers say what the author has always believed: there has always been a shakeout. Of all the PC makers who became visible (as the author defines visibility), 73 percent have since disappeared—at least from the national scene. In addition to detailing how they arrived and left the scene, the author offers some tentative hints for spotting winners and losers.