Micronics Computers was founded by Frank Lin, Dean Chang, Harvey Wong, and Minsiu Huang, four Taiwan-American electronics engineers and businessmen in Mountain View, California, in November 1986.

The two set out to found Micronics as an OEM vendor of IBM PC compatible motherboards for systems integrators to buy in bulk.

After Lin's neighbors complained of electromagnetic interference affecting the reception of their television sets, he and Chang contacted Wong and Huang, and the four pooled together $150,000 to formally incorporate Micronics in Mountain View.

[2] Through their work contacts and after advertising in newspaper classifieds, Micronics was able to find customers for their motherboards, and in early 1987, the company received a $250,000 from several private investors based in the United States and Taiwan.

[1] In 1989, the company released their first motherboard based on the Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) bus, which was devised by the so-called "Gang of Nine" consortium (led by Compaq) as an open-standard competitor to IBM's Micro Channel.

[3] In 1990, Micronics announced their first i486-based motherboards and received an additional $5 million in capital investments from companies in the United States, Hong Kong, and Japan.

[1][4] In August 1991, Micronics made a deal with Alpha Microsystems of Santa Ana to supply the latter with $4 million worth of computer system components.

[7] Co-founder Huang took a sabbatical from late 1991 to mid-1992, rejoining the board of directors around the same time president and CEO Lin announced his retirement.

[12]: C2 [13] IBM's PC Server 300, released in October 1994,[14]: 40  made use of a Micronics motherboard configured with either an Intel DX2 or a Pentium processor clocked at 60 MHz.

[17][18] In October 1996, a group of activist shareholders holding 10 percent of Micronics submit that the company find an interested buyer for a potential merger.

[21] In June 1997, the company announced a potential acquisition of Hayes Microcomputer Products, a manufacturer of computer networking products—namely modems—based in Norcross, Georgia, that was aggressively struggling in the late 1990s.