LGR - Strangest Computer Designs of the '90s
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Gork
Apple+SUN+IBM's CHRP computer, and the BeOS Computer sounded. er -ok- on paper. At the time. Untill your actually tried to use them. The CHRP was (and is. Is because the few made are still used now more than ever. for compatibility checking reasons. Why: they can switch seemlessly on the fly to run what ever app needed. As I badly recall though they use some messy version of a 'thin box' version of JavaOS- this as one can imagine leads to oh so many truly hillarius issues for the hardware, and a UI that is just awkward or even outright bad. BeOS now talk about 90's look and feel for a OS! lol shiny crisp ui, with. no buttons. or hardly any? --uh er oook. the hardware tried to jerry rig fiber optics between parts for (on paper) hillarisly fast badwedget between graphic cards, the cpu cardS -and--ok that's fine. but then had a fragile set of ports that also were fiberoptics based. I think they switched from some glass polymer mix to bog standard metal after the second gen- and the first gen used fiber optics of some kind for the mouse and keyboard. yeah you can see the problems their. While sounded ok for a reeeeely early attempt at USB that (thank god) never gained traction. what this meant and means? good luck replacing those when from wear and tear they start to fail.
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Apple+SUN+IBM's CHRP computer, and the BeOS Computer sounded. er -ok- on paper. At the time. Untill your actually tried to use them. The CHRP was (and is. Is because the few made are still used now more than ever. for compatibility checking reasons. Why: they can switch seemlessly on the fly to run what ever app needed. As I badly recall though they use some messy version of a 'thin box' version of JavaOS- this as one can imagine leads to oh so many truly hillarius issues for the hardware, and a UI that is just awkward or even outright bad. BeOS now talk about 90's look and feel for a OS! lol shiny crisp ui, with. no buttons. or hardly any? --uh er oook. the hardware tried to jerry rig fiber optics between parts for (on paper) hillarisly fast badwedget between graphic cards, the cpu cardS -and--ok that's fine. but then had a fragile set of ports that also were fiberoptics based. I think they switched from some glass polymer mix to bog standard metal after the second gen- and the first gen used fiber optics of some kind for the mouse and keyboard. yeah you can see the problems their. While sounded ok for a reeeeely early attempt at USB that (thank god) never gained traction. what this meant and means? good luck replacing those when from wear and tear they start to fail.
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Cammi
I never heard of that Packard Bell corner PC, But I did once have a monitor like the one pictured with it. The monitor pooped out, but the speakers were still good. They were also removable from the monitor after taking out a few screws. Those speakers spent a little bit of time mounted to the wall on either side of my bed for when I wanted to relax to music or listen to Art Bell at night. They actually sounded pretty good for being rinky-dink little speakers in a plastic, weird, arc-shaped enclosure. Then my broke self gave them a new purpose. I painted them black and they were mounted down to the rear-window deck of my 1985 Chevy Cavalier. I took them out of that before selling the car, and they still worked fine. Now I'm wishing I still had them again for some late night radio listening on sleepless nights. They were so easy to mount on a wall. Just two small drywall screws and run the wires. Done.
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I never heard of that Packard Bell corner PC, But I did once have a monitor like the one pictured with it. The monitor pooped out, but the speakers were still good. They were also removable from the monitor after taking out a few screws. Those speakers spent a little bit of time mounted to the wall on either side of my bed for when I wanted to relax to music or listen to Art Bell at night. They actually sounded pretty good for being rinky-dink little speakers in a plastic, weird, arc-shaped enclosure. Then my broke self gave them a new purpose. I painted them black and they were mounted down to the rear-window deck of my 1985 Chevy Cavalier. I took them out of that before selling the car, and they still worked fine. Now I'm wishing I still had them again for some late night radio listening on sleepless nights. They were so easy to mount on a wall. Just two small drywall screws and run the wires. Done.
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Bru
My first computer was a 1995 Acer aspire in dark purple color. It had a curvaceous sculptured monitor design that I spotted in a movie: Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams (at her house. Brand-new and out the door from Frys Electronics Los Angeles with a Epson printer cost $3, 000. (Socket 5 motherboard, classic Pentium 100 MHz, 1. 6 GHz Hard drive, Windows 95, 16 MB RAM, 14- monitor. In later years I maxed out the processor to 200 MHz MMX and maxed out the RAM but it didn't make any difference really. It slow booted and ran about the same. Putting in a Canopus Total 3-D (V1000 Rendition, Micron chipset) PCI video card did improve game performance.
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My first computer was a 1995 Acer aspire in dark purple color. It had a curvaceous sculptured monitor design that I spotted in a movie: Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams (at her house. Brand-new and out the door from Frys Electronics Los Angeles with a Epson printer cost $3, 000. (Socket 5 motherboard, classic Pentium 100 MHz, 1. 6 GHz Hard drive, Windows 95, 16 MB RAM, 14- monitor. In later years I maxed out the processor to 200 MHz MMX and maxed out the RAM but it didn't make any difference really. It slow booted and ran about the same. Putting in a Canopus Total 3-D (V1000 Rendition, Micron chipset) PCI video card did improve game performance.
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ShoeUnited
Back in 99 I did a little IT work for a university and the ag (agriculture) professor- got one of those Gateway Destinations. They did look nice and they had VGA. The remote was interesting. It was a bit long, but it also had a trackball so it could act as a mouse. Like LGR said, you better be team lifting cause it's awkward as hell trying to move it and the tv weighs right around 200 pounds. They were as low as $3k I believe and I'm pretty sure the high end model was around $7k -$8k. (About $4. 5k to $12. 2k in today's money)
_-You know you're in the midwest when you can be a professor of farming. _
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Back in 99 I did a little IT work for a university and the ag (agriculture) professor- got one of those Gateway Destinations. They did look nice and they had VGA. The remote was interesting. It was a bit long, but it also had a trackball so it could act as a mouse. Like LGR said, you better be team lifting cause it's awkward as hell trying to move it and the tv weighs right around 200 pounds. They were as low as $3k I believe and I'm pretty sure the high end model was around $7k -$8k. (About $4. 5k to $12. 2k in today's money)
_-You know you're in the midwest when you can be a professor of farming. _
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Xeveniah
I've got a plastation 2 dtl T-1000 the console development co. puter hybrid can be a pain in the but but the codewarrior idea is nologer supported for activation. the developer tool is a cool Linux pc console hybrid using Redhat 5 or 6.
And is kinda slow but the ultimate region free ps2. You're gong to shell out close to $1, 000. 00USD. used and working and weighs in at 36lbs yes 36 pounds. I've wanted saturn and dreamcast developer kits with hardware and debugging consoles.
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I've got a plastation 2 dtl T-1000 the console development co. puter hybrid can be a pain in the but but the codewarrior idea is nologer supported for activation. the developer tool is a cool Linux pc console hybrid using Redhat 5 or 6.
And is kinda slow but the ultimate region free ps2. You're gong to shell out close to $1, 000. 00USD. used and working and weighs in at 36lbs yes 36 pounds. I've wanted saturn and dreamcast developer kits with hardware and debugging consoles.
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Gork
Is it bad i've heard of, or tried to use, quite a few on this list. as to the mac anniversary edition. One of the other anoyances was that it used a someway tweaked version of macos. Meaning that apples already thin library of apps, ran into all maner of issues. Up for worse was it's in house apse would out right not work. The writing sweat? crashed the computer. Infamously at that. Ironicaly? Word, and Clarel writer, and thunder writer were fine. Yeah go figure.
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Is it bad i've heard of, or tried to use, quite a few on this list. as to the mac anniversary edition. One of the other anoyances was that it used a someway tweaked version of macos. Meaning that apples already thin library of apps, ran into all maner of issues. Up for worse was it's in house apse would out right not work. The writing sweat? crashed the computer. Infamously at that. Ironicaly? Word, and Clarel writer, and thunder writer were fine. Yeah go figure.
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jrasicmark1
Was it the late 80s or 90s where Tom Bosley did an infomercial for a computer that was designed to connect to your TV to use as a monitor? I thought it was an interesting idea at the time, and it seemed like it would be more affordable than most other computers then, but it also looked as if it would not be compatible with PCs or Macs and I doubt you could have added more software to it (even it other software had been available for it.
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Was it the late 80s or 90s where Tom Bosley did an infomercial for a computer that was designed to connect to your TV to use as a monitor? I thought it was an interesting idea at the time, and it seemed like it would be more affordable than most other computers then, but it also looked as if it would not be compatible with PCs or Macs and I doubt you could have added more software to it (even it other software had been available for it.
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Douglas
Some of those died because they were conceptually ahead of their time and the technology and infrastructure didn't yet exist to make it work right. Consider the advent of cloud computing and the 5g network. Computers built into appliances are pretty common place nowadays. and internet only computers that don't have a traditional hard drive are carving out their own market niche. That doesn't even touch on smartphones killing off the PDA.
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Some of those died because they were conceptually ahead of their time and the technology and infrastructure didn't yet exist to make it work right. Consider the advent of cloud computing and the 5g network. Computers built into appliances are pretty common place nowadays. and internet only computers that don't have a traditional hard drive are carving out their own market niche. That doesn't even touch on smartphones killing off the PDA.
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Matt328
I really miss those crazy desings. today everything is a rectangle, the monitor is a rectangle, the keyboard is a rectangle, the pc case is a rectangle, the smartphone is a rectangle, the tv is a rectangle, probably the mouse is the only thing that still has some curves. Straight lines are boring and sad.
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I really miss those crazy desings. today everything is a rectangle, the monitor is a rectangle, the keyboard is a rectangle, the pc case is a rectangle, the smartphone is a rectangle, the tv is a rectangle, probably the mouse is the only thing that still has some curves. Straight lines are boring and sad.
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fanjoy
The Gateway Destination was probably the least strange in this line-up. And to be honest the rest are just different chassis with the same hardware pretty much. The compaq presario was most likely marketed to businesses though due to its shape (meant to be a cash register maybe)
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The Gateway Destination was probably the least strange in this line-up. And to be honest the rest are just different chassis with the same hardware pretty much. The compaq presario was most likely marketed to businesses though due to its shape (meant to be a cash register maybe)
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