Golden Computer Arcade
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Golden Computer Arcade (Traditional Chinese: 黃金電腦商場) and Golden Computer Centre (高登電腦中心) are two markets for computer and computer related products in the same building in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong. They were originally fashion markets named Golden Shopping Arcade and Golden Shopping Centre respectively, but later the clothing shops were replaced by ones selling electronics, video games, and computers. It was the first computer market in Hong Kong and today Golden (高登/黃金) is synonymous to computer market in the minds of Hong Kong people even though many other similar computer arcades have been established today.
The Golden Computer Arcade occupied the basement and the first floor of the building. The shops in the basement mainly sell computer books and computer accessories such as CD-R discs, cables, keyboards while the ones in first floor sell video game machines and electronic products. The Golden Computer Centre stacks above the arcade. Its shops mainly sell computers, printers, and many other computer parts and peripherals.
Up until the mid-90's, the basement and part of the first floor Golden Computer Arcade was Hong Kong's centre for software piracy, and the majority of the stores that occupied the bottom floors of the shopping centre at that time were vendors selling pirated software - originally copied onto blank floppy disks on demand, but as the format caught on this was changed to pirated (but pressed) CDs, mostly produced in cheap factories in China. In the final years leading up until the handover of control Hong Kong from the British to the PRC in 1997 the police conducted a series of raids on the said shopping centre, shutting down all the said vendors and leading to the transformation of the basement level to the computer accessory vendor theme it holds today.
At this time the Hong Kong police also tightened up border checks for pirated CDs, and today the majority of the pirated software available in Hong Kong is actually sold on CD-Rs burnt in CD duplicator towers.
People often come here and acquire relatively cheap parts to build their personal computers, which often demonstrate superior performance to branded computers of the same price as the components, provided they were assembled properly.
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