Founded to develop peripherals for Commodore home computers, the company in 1986 began selling low-cost IBM PC compatibles.

After graduation, both Rosita and John Rossi spent three years in Saudi Arabia, the former landing a job teaching English to residents of villages near a gas–oil separation plant during the 1973 oil crisis.

[2] Rosita Rossi expressed exasperation with the long hours John had been working: "The company was going through great growth, and they didn't care about the families—just their business.

[3] By 1982, the company relocated to and formally incorporated itself in Scottsdale, Arizona,[4] after Rosita began attending Thunderbird to earn a business degree for herself.

[5] Blue Chip offered its first products in 1983 with a line of RS-232 serial and HP-IB parallel high-resolution dot-matrix printers for computers such as the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC.

[6] Later that year Blue Chip introduced a daisy wheel printer, the BCD-4015, that supports both cut-sheet and tractor-feed stationery, 5 to 15 inches wide.

[13] In July 1986, the company announced an IBM PC compatible, the Blue Chip Personal Computer, to be released in October.

[14] Blue Chip hired an unnamed company in Japan to design the computer and Hyundai Electronics in Korea to manufacture it.

[11] Hyundai Electronics had been founded earlier in 1983 to market the parent company's computer hardware directly to resellers abroad.

Other chaebols at the time relied on the white-label market, signing contracts with companies abroad to be their original equipment manufacturer (OEM), in exchange for their products being rebranded and rebadged.

Hyundai's first attempt at selling hardware under their name in the West had been largely unsuccessful; its competitors Samsung and Daewoo, on the other hand, had become well-entrenched in the American computer market from their white-label partnerships with U.S.-based resellers.

[26] Although disappointed that this was only roughly a quarter of their expected sales,[15] they remained optimistic and projected a total of 50,000 units sold by the end of 1986.

The company sought to rectify the latter by educating retail salespeople through seminars, training videos, and a floppy disk that demonstrated the computer's strengths.

Blue Chip followed up with a lawsuit, seeking US$4.5 million in damages, and turned to TriGem Computer, another Korean electronics company, for manufacturing.

[36] After breaking away from Blue Chip, Hyundai began selling computers under its own name in the United States, starting in September 1987.

[40] By 1989, the company had grown to 30 employees, including John and Rosita Rossi, and its international subsidiary had offices in Hong Kong, Paris, and Amsterdam.

[40] In January 1989, Capewood Limited, a holding company based in Hong Kong, expressed interest in acquiring Blue Chip Electronics and its International subsidiary for an undisclosed sum.

[43] Capewood apparently struggled with the Blue Chip name in 1990, with allegations of the company delivering faulty machines and generating bad debt among dealers.