A reporter on the Orange County Register – Orange County is next door to Los Angeles – has been keeping count of crimes generated by the 1988 memory chip shortage, and reports that since last September, five chip-related armed robberies have occurred: according to Newsbytes, in September, a man in a business suit entered a Stanton, California computer store, severely beat the owner and left with chips worth $40,000; in late November, armed robbers took $160,000 in custom memory chips, closely resembling DRAMs, from Holt Inc; in January, thieves armed with assault rifles broke into AST Research Inc, bound two guards, beat and kicked one and then broke into a locked area trying unsuccessfully to find chips and took $17,000 of computer equipment instead; the same month, two armed robbers got away from Western Digital Corp’s facility with $105,000 of DRAMs the company had just bought; and in March, four heavily armed men wearing ski masks were thwarted in their attempt to steal DRAMs by two cleaning women who locked themselves in the company’s offices and called police.
