Packard Bell Corner Computer: One of 1995's Strangest PCs
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Celtic
So I had this computer, it was my third computer after my IBM XT, 486 DX33, and then this one! I used to help with computer shows, and a family member bought the base with no monitor or speakers for me at Christmas. For me it was an upgrade to Pentium, way more hard drive space and memory. I did have the remote and that mouse was awkward. The remote to your point was useless unless you were starting a movie. I did have a ViewSonic 15 sitting on top of it so i had a little bit larger monitor. I do remember I did not have the TV card and I was always trying to find it at shows and online but never did find it. I do know that everyone who came over always thought it was so futuristic and cool. The setup was not all that great for upgrading video and sound cards so after about three years I built a full tower to replace it. My daughter was young when I got it and she has fond memories of playing games on it. I started watching your show recently and eventually will contact you about donating some of my old stuff. I have pretty much all the sound blaster cards, and was big on all ATI All In Wonder Video cards since I used my computers ad TVs as well. Anyways enjoying this video and keep them coming, I am remembering all of things I forgot over the years.
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So I had this computer, it was my third computer after my IBM XT, 486 DX33, and then this one! I used to help with computer shows, and a family member bought the base with no monitor or speakers for me at Christmas. For me it was an upgrade to Pentium, way more hard drive space and memory. I did have the remote and that mouse was awkward. The remote to your point was useless unless you were starting a movie. I did have a ViewSonic 15 sitting on top of it so i had a little bit larger monitor. I do remember I did not have the TV card and I was always trying to find it at shows and online but never did find it. I do know that everyone who came over always thought it was so futuristic and cool. The setup was not all that great for upgrading video and sound cards so after about three years I built a full tower to replace it. My daughter was young when I got it and she has fond memories of playing games on it. I started watching your show recently and eventually will contact you about donating some of my old stuff. I have pretty much all the sound blaster cards, and was big on all ATI All In Wonder Video cards since I used my computers ad TVs as well. Anyways enjoying this video and keep them coming, I am remembering all of things I forgot over the years.
reply
Rich
Bought a Packard Bell i386 sx20 desktop system in 1992 at a Costco store to run an electrical contractors' estimating program (which ran perfectly well in Dos 5. 0)
However, running anything in Windows 3. 0 was like trudging through chilled molasses. They might nearly as well have put a static view of the hourglass in the monitor, since that was the prevailing sight most of the time.
It featured, lol: 2 Mb page file ram, one each 5 1/4- and 3 1/2- floppy drives, 175 Mb ) HDD, cheesy KB & mouse, and a 13- diagonal monitor which was much closer to measuring 12- /.
It didn't last much longer than a year. I accidentally unplugged the mouse while it was powered up, and it just expired. Only the three disk drives, monitor, and measly 2 Mb of ram was reusable.
And at the time I bought it, it was far from being a low priced super-snail system.
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Bought a Packard Bell i386 sx20 desktop system in 1992 at a Costco store to run an electrical contractors' estimating program (which ran perfectly well in Dos 5. 0)
However, running anything in Windows 3. 0 was like trudging through chilled molasses. They might nearly as well have put a static view of the hourglass in the monitor, since that was the prevailing sight most of the time.
It featured, lol: 2 Mb page file ram, one each 5 1/4- and 3 1/2- floppy drives, 175 Mb ) HDD, cheesy KB & mouse, and a 13- diagonal monitor which was much closer to measuring 12- /.
It didn't last much longer than a year. I accidentally unplugged the mouse while it was powered up, and it just expired. Only the three disk drives, monitor, and measly 2 Mb of ram was reusable.
And at the time I bought it, it was far from being a low priced super-snail system.
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Rockin4D
Back in the day when the average consumer had to deal with the bloat on systems that only came with 4 to 8 megabytes of ram. Win95 took a painful 5 minutes to boot then another 5 minutes for all the side loaded bloatware to load and cache on the hard disk. I threw on another 8 megabytes of ram to 16 total and reformated it with a plain copy of Win95 and added only the programs i wanted on it. Plus added the 512 cache chip on the motherboard. that packard bell i had ran like 5 times faster afterwards. To the average consumer, memory was very expensive, and really slowed down the system otherwise. For kicks i added that 2nd meg of ram to the onboard video and eventually did purchase a 4 meg video card with the add on 3dfx 1 card.
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Back in the day when the average consumer had to deal with the bloat on systems that only came with 4 to 8 megabytes of ram. Win95 took a painful 5 minutes to boot then another 5 minutes for all the side loaded bloatware to load and cache on the hard disk. I threw on another 8 megabytes of ram to 16 total and reformated it with a plain copy of Win95 and added only the programs i wanted on it. Plus added the 512 cache chip on the motherboard. that packard bell i had ran like 5 times faster afterwards. To the average consumer, memory was very expensive, and really slowed down the system otherwise. For kicks i added that 2nd meg of ram to the onboard video and eventually did purchase a 4 meg video card with the add on 3dfx 1 card.
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David
I remember these-. how could anyone forget!
At this time, it was all about M U L T I M E D I A W I TH W I N D O W S 95
PC/monitors (inc Apple Mac and Apple monitors) had speakers sprouting out the sides.
-it was supposed to be -cool-.
Just after this I had a black Mac 5500, tv & radio (with black remote control, stereo speakers, cd drive, same sort of thing going on.
We laugh now, but examples like that were the first baby steps toward convergence-. apps on tv? Streaming from iPad/iPhone/android to tv? That-s the sort of things we were aiming for in the mid-late 90s.
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I remember these-. how could anyone forget!
At this time, it was all about M U L T I M E D I A W I TH W I N D O W S 95
PC/monitors (inc Apple Mac and Apple monitors) had speakers sprouting out the sides.
-it was supposed to be -cool-.
Just after this I had a black Mac 5500, tv & radio (with black remote control, stereo speakers, cd drive, same sort of thing going on.
We laugh now, but examples like that were the first baby steps toward convergence-. apps on tv? Streaming from iPad/iPhone/android to tv? That-s the sort of things we were aiming for in the mid-late 90s.
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Jurtaani
that multimedia remote reminds me of my hp pavilion dv6732eo multimedia laptop.
that thing come with not one but two infrared remotes, one small that could be hid inside the expansion port on the computer and another one that was normal remote sized one.
but thanks for added power and hdmi output, that thing worked great as home theater pc.
just configure kodi media center to work with windows media center remotes, and that thing was great.
only in 2017 did i stop using it, as i bought myself a nvidia shield box for tthe same purpose.
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that multimedia remote reminds me of my hp pavilion dv6732eo multimedia laptop.
that thing come with not one but two infrared remotes, one small that could be hid inside the expansion port on the computer and another one that was normal remote sized one.
but thanks for added power and hdmi output, that thing worked great as home theater pc.
just configure kodi media center to work with windows media center remotes, and that thing was great.
only in 2017 did i stop using it, as i bought myself a nvidia shield box for tthe same purpose.
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RyzelSama
omfg I LOVED Navigator as a kid! This is really Nostalgic for me! XD, we didn't have the corner PB one but we had all the bells and whistles for ours, including the remote, until our new puppies chewed through the receiver for it XD, I remember we had this dinky little mic and we could make phone calls with it too. I still have the speakers to the old thing, to bad we gave the rest of that computer to my cousin dani for school and her dad destroyed it in a childish fit of rage. still upset about that.
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omfg I LOVED Navigator as a kid! This is really Nostalgic for me! XD, we didn't have the corner PB one but we had all the bells and whistles for ours, including the remote, until our new puppies chewed through the receiver for it XD, I remember we had this dinky little mic and we could make phone calls with it too. I still have the speakers to the old thing, to bad we gave the rest of that computer to my cousin dani for school and her dad destroyed it in a childish fit of rage. still upset about that.
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zechs
My friends family had one. It had a -not MS Bob- desktop/ui replacement where you could like walk around a building or house and each room had different categories of applications or something.
We played so much SimCity on that bad boy. Also a hospital/ER game that was basically a set of mini games for each disease. We always wanted to do the cancer one because it was like a lazer shooter game. But mostly we tried to break out of the hospital/grounds.
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My friends family had one. It had a -not MS Bob- desktop/ui replacement where you could like walk around a building or house and each room had different categories of applications or something.
We played so much SimCity on that bad boy. Also a hospital/ER game that was basically a set of mini games for each disease. We always wanted to do the cancer one because it was like a lazer shooter game. But mostly we tried to break out of the hospital/grounds.
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Maciej
I had a slightly different Packard Bell 100 MHz Pentium PC back between 1995-2000 but my friend had this version at home with a 133 MHz pentium chip. The software packages were exactly the same as shown in video. I loved seeing all the hits again including Journeyman and of course Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. It brought back memories of me as an 8th grader surfing the very early internet using Netscape.
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I had a slightly different Packard Bell 100 MHz Pentium PC back between 1995-2000 but my friend had this version at home with a 133 MHz pentium chip. The software packages were exactly the same as shown in video. I loved seeing all the hits again including Journeyman and of course Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. It brought back memories of me as an 8th grader surfing the very early internet using Netscape.
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David
Gah i got some major nostalgia as i had an HP PC with the same software suite. Wasted so much time on spider man cartoon maker. Got so irritated on Journeyman project though as there was a spot that required something from the manual and it was either not included or i lost it. Somehow i managed to skip to the end of the game and that was weird. And Duke 3D was pretty much my first PC gaming exp
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Gah i got some major nostalgia as i had an HP PC with the same software suite. Wasted so much time on spider man cartoon maker. Got so irritated on Journeyman project though as there was a spot that required something from the manual and it was either not included or i lost it. Somehow i managed to skip to the end of the game and that was weird. And Duke 3D was pretty much my first PC gaming exp
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sedrosken
Man, all those crunchy hard drive noises take me back more than I thought they would. My SD adapter is worlds faster, bigger capacity and more convenient, but I can-t help but feel like I-m missing something all these years later. I can still hear my 486 -thinking- because of the bus whine coming through my speakers, so at least there-s that.
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Man, all those crunchy hard drive noises take me back more than I thought they would. My SD adapter is worlds faster, bigger capacity and more convenient, but I can-t help but feel like I-m missing something all these years later. I can still hear my 486 -thinking- because of the bus whine coming through my speakers, so at least there-s that.
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