At first, it was an opportunistic grift by a teenager looking for party money.
As prices fell rapidly at the supply level, local box stores would occasionally sell off stock at deep discounts (reflecting the real market price). Being a teenage sociopath, I would buy every last bit of it in town and then coast on the uninformed price perception for a week or two.
Prices were falling so fast at that time that the stores were always wrong footed, so I was able to keep up that racket long enough to get to the bottom of that mechanism and start ordering in bulk directly from city of industry California.
Place was called Ma labs, iirc. After that it was obvious to start moving disk drives, video cards, processors, and later everything else too. I was just exploiting basic market inefficiencies , since the only other sources were the big box stores that were constantly 2-4 months behind the price curve.
Then COMDEX happened. It got me tied directly in to motherboard and peripheral card manufacturers. I also got introduced to the cocaine and extremely friendly booth-girl shmoozefest, and NGL for naive Alaskan me it was heady stuff. The real deals and the points negotiations were made in the afterparties with piles of coke and very persuasive “account representatives”. Memorable times were had in the hedonistic environment of an exploding industry.
At that time there were a lot of small manufacturers in industrial parks. They were usually pretty small outfits usually just a shop with a few hot air stations for warranty work and a wave soldering table, 15-20 employees at jet labs, for example, which was one of our big suppliers of motherboards, video cards, modems, lan, and other peripheral cards.
My activity festered a plague of tiny pc builders selling systems, and launched the careers of at least 50 technicians and small businesses. We used to put on big public LAN parties and public PC repair clinics as promotions for our “dealers”. I worked with a training/testing outfit to get new dealers A+ certification to reduce the damage to society and actually grew into a semi responsible citizen during that time.
Fond memories but I’m glad to leave that hustle behind.
After that, I unwittingly became a software developer for a major criminal organisation. I thought they were a car dealership, but gradually it became apparent as I built out their backend that the dealership was just a small part of a very large laundromat.
It took me years to extricate myself from that and for years afterwards they would give me gentle reminders that they were keeping an eye on me. Free 500 dollar an hour lawyer’s though. They never let me get near a courtroom or a police interaction without “proper” representation showing up even for years afterwards (statute of limitations?)
The fact that they always knew when I brushed up against the legal system in any small way, even traffic tickets in rental cars, gave me great respect for the scope of their concern. That and their obvious love for mid range turbine helicopters.
I was probably lucky to leave that alive.