AST Founder Repeats Script With AMKLY : Personal computers: Does the world need another vendor? Albert C. Wong made a fortune the first time around and looks to do it again.

Albert C. Wong made a fortune as co-founder of a company that started out making accessories for personal computers and later began building the computers themselves.

Now, the soft-spoken, 41-year-old Wong is using $2 million of that fortune to found a company that will start out making accessories for personal computers and will later begin building the computers themselves.

Wong says the resemblance between his old company, AST Research, and his new one, AMKLY Systems of Irvine, is entirely superficial, since the personal computer business has changed enormously in the 10 years since AST was formed.

“AST was founded at the right time, a period of explosive growth,” Wong said. “With AMKLY, we have to be a lot more careful in terms of our planning.”

For Wong, careful means focusing on specialized niches. AMKLY’s first product is a memory expansion device for high-end Compaq personal computers.

But even so, won’t AMKLY be competing with AST once it launches its own computer later this year? “I don’t look at it that way,” Wong said with a slightly mischievous grin.

Wong probably wouldn’t mind if his new company stole just a little bit of business from his old one. As one of three founding partners at AST, Wong was the key design engineer and later oversaw all technical operations for a firm that became one of the great success stories of the PC industry.

“He was responsible for most of the products that made AST what it is,” said Stewart Alsop, publisher of the PC Letter in Redwood City.

The rapid growth of AST, however, began to take its toll on the close relationship between Wong and the other two partners, Thomas C.K. Yuen and Safi U. Qureshey. Wong quit the company abruptedly in November, 1988, stating that he and the partners “just didn’t get along.” He remained on the AST board and took advantage of the chance to spend more time with his twin 2-year-olds.

Last August, Wong said, he decided it was “time to come back to the industry.” He resigned from the AST board and started up AMKLY. The odd-sounding name is composed of the first initials of each of his family members.

After studying the market, he concluded that a circuit board that boosted the memory of PCs--the same type of product that launched AST--would be the new firm’s first project.

Wong explained that Compaq computers use a proprietary design for the boards that hold the rows of chips that make up a computer’s internal memory. Buying those boards from Compaq is very expensive. AMKLY will offer Compaq customers an industry-standard board layout, enabling them to purchase just the number of memory units they want from whomever they want and plug them into the board.

Alsop said Wong’s idea is interesting. “It provides a real neat solution for a certain group of people, which is exactly what AST did,” he said.

Wong said his new board is “a packaging innovation that allows the user to have better control” over how a system is upgraded. And it will cost them as little as half as much as the standard Compaq expansion unit. Wong said additional enhancement products would be forthcoming, but he declined to elaborate.

Packaging innovation and user control will also be the guiding principle behind AMKLY’s personal computers, which Wong expects to launch by the year’s end. He won’t disclose details about price or performance, but says the machines will be designed for ease of installation, ease of maintenance and ease of use.

That’s supposed to appeal both to dealers--who are increasingly sensitive to demands for better service--and to users, who don’t want to spend six hours taking a machine out a box and setting it up. “I don’t want to mass market, and I don’t want an esoteric product,” Wong said, explaining that his machine would be aimed at mainstream business users who don’t necessarily need the fastest machine on the market but put a high premium on simplicity.

If all goes according plan, AMKLY will have revenue of $20 million to $30 million within a year, and $100 million to $150 million within five years, Wong said. The company now employs just 12 people but expects to be up to 45 within a year. It is leasing a 21,000-square-foot facility in the Irvine Spectrum for manufacturing and corporate offices.

The question that remains, of course, is whether the world needs another personal computer vendor. Alsop, for one, thinks there’s still a lot of room for design improvements in IBM-compatible personal computers, and he notes that Wong has two of the critical ingredients necessary for success: credibility and capital. And for those attributes, he can thank AST.