AST Research, Inc., later doing business as AST Computer, was an American personal computer manufacturer. It was founded in 1980 in Irvine, California, by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey, and Thomas Yuen, as an initialism of their first names. Wong left the company nine years later, followed by Yuen in 1992, with Qureshey remaining until AST was acquired by Samsung Electronics in 1997.
The company began by making a circuit board for the IBM PC that boosted its memory storage. AST went public in 1984 and would be a manufacturer of boards and add-on expansion cards. By the late 1980s, it had evolved into a major personal computer manufacturer with its line of Intel i386 based PC clones, and it was the first vendor to announce an i486 PC. In 1990, AST released an NEC PC-9801 clone in the Japanese market, becoming the first American PC vendor to market an NEC clone.