The Beatles

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Thu Jun 25 19:33:16 1998

> I just found a discarded Packard Bell 486 (I almost left it because the
> case looked like a 286's). I don't know why you all dislike those things
> so much, this case is very good. Anyway, when the machine boots, the ROM
> displays a "Packard Bell" graphic, complete with a 3-second fade-in (if
> only people paid so much attention to _useful_ stuff). Underneath, it
> displays, "America grew up listening to us. It still does." Now, this is
> my question. What does this mean? When was this company founded, and
> what was their original product?

Packard-Bell, as you see it, is simply not the company it used to be. As
with so many American company names, someone bought the name.

I think (do not quote me on any of this!) that originally it was two
seperate entities - Packard Instrument and Bell Sound. The former was
around in the 1950s, and made test equipment for the nuclear industry.
Bell Sound may have been earlier, as they made Speech Amplifiers for the
World War Two U.S. Navy model TBL radio transmitters. Eventually
Packard-Bell was formed, and made all sorts of things, including a small
family of minicomputers in the early 1960s. RCS/RI has one of the
machines, a pb250.

I have no idea what happened to Packard-Bell. They may still be around,
doing defense work, or they may have been swallowed up. The Packard-Bells
at CompUSA, however, are simply not related.

By the way, Packard-Bell has nothing to do with HP.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Thu Jun 25 1998 - 19:33:16 BST