The Packard Bell Story

me to cover on this show. And some folks actually do that, like Andy, who actually sent his suggestion to me directly to my personal Twitter account that, by the way, is at John Strickland and that's a j O in Strickland. Anyway, Andy wrote, you cover Packard Bell before? Probably well, Andy, I haven't covered Packard Bell before, but I'm going to do it now so that shows you. Well. I gotta

little confrontational there. I'm sorry Andy to know what came over me, but yes, it's time to talk about Packard Bell now. For someone my age, the name Packard Bell brings to mind an army of IBM PC clones in the nineteen eighties and nineties. I'll get into what that means later on, but while I think most folks around my age associate Packard Bell with inexpensive and frequently mocked

personal computers. The company's origins, or at least the origins of the name of the company, go back much, much further. The full story of Packard Bell is one of entrepreneurship, innovation, acquisitions, betrayal, death, resurrections, and fading into the sunset only to come back. The story shares some parallels with other company stories like a TORII, and I'll explain that a little bit further on. For now,

let's start with a man named Herb Bell. Kind of Now, the history of both the company and this founder are a bit muddled. Some history state that Packard Bell should trace its origins to nineteen twenty six. Others say no, no, no, it should be nineteen thirty three. The company itself was incorporated in ninety five, according to The New York Times. The New York Times also says that Herbert Bell was born in eighteen ninety in Rock Valley, Iowa, but other

sources say he was born in Burlington, Wisconsin. So, as you guys can gather, this is a somewhat difficult story to tell, but hey, history is more than just dates. And places right. So we'll just accept that there is some confusion about the details of this history, or that we're dealing with a multiverse, parallel dimension situation here. Either of those I think work as a get out of jail free card in this situation. So when Herb Bell was growing up in either Iowa or Wisconsin, he wasn't

necessarily dreaming of building an electronics company. I should add he definitely grew up in Burlington. I found newspaper articles from Burlington that talked about it. So it might be possible that he wasn't born there, but he definitely grew up there. Herbert Bell was actually born Herbert Anthony Zwiebel. He had four brothers, Arthur, Albert, Elmer, and Willard. Between nineteen ten and nineteen fifteen, these brothers all left home to quote make their way in the world end quote.

Herbert left Burlington in nineteen twelve to go to Milwaukee. He found work with the Mitchell Automobile Company, where he worked until nineteen eighteen, at which point he set out to make a company of his own. In partnership with his brothers Arthur and Albert, they formed the Zwiebel Brothers Company. And they manufactured tires and related equipment for vehicles. A bit later, they brought in brother Elmer, also known as Bub,

and he owned the Bub Body Company. The four brothers incorporated the two companies together, forming a voltron of car part companies. I guess. In nineteen twenty one, the brothers decided to sell this business. They turned it public and they handed it over to a new board of directors, and they pocketed the cash. They all packed up and moved to California because actually their parents had relocated to California back in nineteen nineteen, so they were following behind.

They had made a good amount of money by building up their business and then selling it, and so they looked for what would come next. For Herbert that would end up being electronics. He became interested in the young industry. He was just starting to to really flourish in the Los Angeles area around this time, so radio was very young. The first license radios to stations in the United States began to broadcast in nineteen twenty, so this is still

very very early in the history of radio. And her Bell was one of those tech entrepreneurs who would establish a well worn tradition. By this time today. He started his company in a garage, actually his parents garage to be precise. He began to learn how to build radio sets and the ins and outs of electronics. His early work focused on providing coin operated radio sets for hotel lobbies. So imagine that you're in a hotel lobby, there's a

radio there. You actually have to put a coin in and then it will play whatever station you tune it to for however long. The coin operation thing lasts interesting concept. Herbert made his brother Albert a partner in the business, but this early company didn't establish itself, and by nineteen twenty nine it was out of business. Undiscouraged, Herbert Bell found a financial partner in a certain Simtir Edward Jackson if You're nasty, and together they formed the Jackson Bell

Radio Company. Jackson Bell radios are to this day sought after by collectors. That being said, according to the Radio History Museum, Jackson Bell wasn't really in the business of manufacturing radios so much as it was all about marketing radios. The actual radios, again according to the Radio History Museum, were made by a company called Gilfillan Brothers Radio Company. Whether Jackson Bell made their own radios or not as kind of a moot point, because it wasn't around for

very long. It got started in nineteen thirty, but it was out of business by nineteen three. This was during a truly tumultuous time in economic history. In nineteen twenty nine, stock prices in the United States began to plummet, leading to a massive crash in the market on October. The economic all outstretched all around the world and it would take a decade to get back to where the market had been before the crash. This was the Great Depression.

I don't see what's so great about it. The Swiebels company was, like many others, affected by this fallout, and the brothers folded their business. Part of the problem was due to a bigger company making some rather broad changes. That company was our c A, which I have actually covered in previous episodes of Tech Stuff, multiple episodes in fact, so you can go back through our archives and listen

to those. The Swiebel Brothers had a license to sell our c A radios, but when the company introduced a new type of radio that made the ones that the Sweebels had in their inventory completely obsolete. As we will, company really began to struggle. Jackson Bell just couldn't really

do anything. They now had products that were hard to sell right at the beginning of a severe economic depress, so they couldn't move their inventory, they couldn't afford to invest in the new technology, and they just had to close up shop as a result. Now, this is why some histories say that Packard Bell cannot use nineteen twenty six as the starting point, because even though that's when Herb got into the electronics gig, the companies he founded

all ceased to exist by the early nineteen thirties. Herb was down, but he wasn't out. He and his brothers changed their last name to Bell officially, mostly to americanize their names a bit more, even though they were all Americans. And in nineteen thirty three, her Bell would strike up a new partnership to launch another electronics business, this time with a guy named Leon Packard Packard Bell. Packard was able to secure investments from his family to start up

this new business. Some reports say he used a trust fund, some say that it was an uncle who lent the money, but in any case, he was kind of the cash behind the whole business. And again the business was called Packard Bell, but Leon Packard wasn't part of this company for very long. He apparently got unhappy with the way her Bell was pushing things. Bell was aiming for more ambitious, more expensive radio sets, and Packard was worried about it

getting priced out of the market. So Herb would end up buying out his partner sometime in either nineteen thirty four or nineteen thirty five. Again I found sources that gave conflicting dates, but it did happen right around that time. Now there was no longer a Packard at Packard Bell, but the company had established the sort of brand name, so rather than mess with that, they stuck with it.

So Packard was gone, but Packard Bell remained. The first product out of Packard Bell, as far as I can determine, was a rebranded Jackson Bell tabletop radio called the Model thirty five. A tabletop meaning this was a radio that could sit on a table, as opposed to a giant console radio that was a free standing piece of furniture. They still were pretty big and they involved a lot of artistry. The cabinets that were made for these these radios often are gorgeous. In fact, that's one of the

reasons why UH collectors seek out these antique radios. They were also very specific to the regions where they were produced. I'll say more about that in a second. So Urban his brothers maintained close business relationships. And the brothers had all founded their own businesses, and we're manufacturing various components and her Bell would package them together as finished radio.

So some of them were making electronics, some of them were cabinet makers, and collectively they were all kind of creating the pieces that would allow Packard Bell to sell finished radios. So Packard Bell was really more of an assembly company, not a manufacturer. They took the component it's from the other brothers organizations. One interesting thing Bell did, as I mentioned, was he customized his radios for the

West Coast region. Remember they were located at a California So rather than simply creating a radio with a dial that has all the different radio frequencies marked on it, he actually listed out the radio stations with their respective frequencies. So let's say that you have a radio station called we'll just say Bob, and the radio station Bob is at a M seven fifty and instead of having it saying just a M seven fifty. You would actually write out Bob on the dial, so people could dial directly

to whichever radio station they were interested in. They didn't have to hunt through the frequencies. And Bell was primarily selling radios to people on or near the West Coast, so he could do this. It was called stationizing, and he could do it because he wasn't selling radios to people in other parts of the world, where the radio stations would be totally different, and for those frequencies. It would actually take several years before the company would start

to sell radios beyond this immediate region. The nice thing was you didn't have to remember about which station was using which frequency. You just set the dial to the station you were interested in because things were right there. And the story goes that the inspiration for doing this all came from Mama Bell. Now I don't mean mob Bell the phone company, but rather the mother of the

Bell brothers. Herbs said that his mother complained about the printing on radio dials and that it was too difficult for her to read those numbers and thus be able to tune the radio to the station she wanted. Packard Bell licensed some of our CIA's radio technology and incorporated that technology into their own radios. Or Bell led his company into establishing a pretty solid reputation upon the outbreak

of World War Two in Europe. Then Packard Bell began to branch out from radios and we're done building components and technologies for the US military. One of those technologies was the transponder. Now, Packard Bell did not invent the transponder. It wasn't created out of Packard Bell. British engineers actually created the first transponders, but Packard Bell helped develop them and manufacture them. So what the heck is a transponder. Well,

it's an electronic component. Technically, it's a transceiver that's used in aircraft. During World War Two, it served as a way for radar stations to identify whether a detected aircraft was friendly or not. The idea was actually incredibly simple. You would outfit your aircraft with these transponders, which, upon receiving a signal, could send out a message that contained the identifying information of that aircraft. In fact, it could

just contain a signal, a simple signal. So essentially this plane was saying, hey, it's okay, I'm a buddy, you know I'm not I'm not one of the enemy. And the British called this tech a parrot transponder. The parrot would squawk or send out its message. American engineers called it identification friend or foe or I F F for short. Creating unique codes for aircraft would come a little bit later,

but that would help too. So now not only did you know, oh, this is a friendly aircraft because it's responding to the signal and giving me the appropriate response. Now I can actually get specific unique signals, so I can say exactly which aircraft it is. Not just that it's friendly, but I know which one it is. Even if the enemy figured out that Allied planes were sending back signals, the odds of them picking an existing signal

to masquerade as a friendly aircraft would be slim. The one big problem was that the transponder signals were strong enough to muck up radar stations. So an incoming signal from a transponder was powerful enough that it would completely cover a radar screen. It was like you had an enormous puddle of ink covering up your screen, except it was, you know, points of light. So pilots were instructed instead to turn on their transponders when they were prompted by

radio operators. The informal way, as I said, was to call this squawking. So to squawk your parrot is to turn on your transponder so it sends a message back down to the ground. Then you're supposed to turn it back off again because you don't want to flood the

radar stations. Eventually, this technology found its way into civilian aircraft and it became a way for air traffic control to identify aircraft in specific airspace, and when paired with other electronics, the transponder could send back specific information beyond just the identity of the aircraft. It could also send stuff like that aircraft's altitude, and pilots could set transponders

to send specific messages when other communications systems failed. If, for example, their radio failed, the pilot could set a transponder so that the code sent to a t C would correspond to an emergency message such as may day, or communications are down or even hijack, So pilots can squawk if they're in trouble. They can set their transponder to that specific code to indicate the issue, so it's an emergency system as well as an identification system. Transponders

are pretty interesting. For one thing, they only allow codes with digits between zero and seven, or at least the original ones did. But to explain why that is why they could only use between zero and seven would take a bit more time away from our topic. So I'm going to spare you. Guys. You're welcome, but maybe someday I'll go into a full episode about transponders. So you've been warned, But for now, let's take a quick break. Okay.

Packard Bell continues to put together radios and make military components all throughout World War Two, and the company was doing pretty well. Like it wasn't going gangbusters, but it was profitable. It was still focused on that regional market, so it's still making radio sets for people on the West coast of the United States, still going with that

stationized approach to the dials. After the war, Packard Bell finally incorporated, at least according to The New York Times in its obituary for her Bell spoiler alert or Bell passed away a long time ago. But Packard Bell also began to enter into a new industry. They began to get into television manufacturing. Television's back then were similar to the old school radios. They tended to be pretty large

pieces of furniture, often housed in cabinets. The earliest ones I know about from Packard Bell were three models that the company introduced in nineteen. Two of those were console models, essentially the cabinet style. I was just talking about these free standing pieces of furniture that had television sets inside them.

The third model was a tabletop model, and so in this case, the television was inside a wooden frame another like wooden cabinet, but it was small enough to sit on a table as opposed to stand freely on its own. The screen on the tabletop model, and the smaller of the two console models was ten inches on the diagonal, just ten one zero. The larger console had a twelve inch screen. It also had a radio and a phonograph built into this thing. I imagine it had to be

a bit of a monster. The company would continue producing television's, branching into color TV a decade later, and I've covered how TV works several times, so don't worry, I'm not gonna go on a how television works tangent here. Packard Bell found success in the television market, just as it had with the radio market, and before long the company

was selling its products across the United States. This also meant finally abandoning that stationized approach to radio dials, because now the frequencies weren't corresponding to the same radio stations. There was no guarantee that the person who was buying your radio would have access to the exact same radio stations as what you were putting on the dial, so

they get rid of that. By the mid nineteen fifties, things were good enough with Packard Bell for them to go public, with the company to go from private company to publicly traded company, or Bell would step down as president, but he would remain on the board of directors for several more years. In the meantime, the company wanted to stretch a bit more to get into some other industries, and so they created a new division focused on building

out computers. Now this was still in the late nineteen fifties, so we're not talking about personal computers here. We're talking about many computers, kind of the the bridge between mainframe systems and the desktop machines that we would later know and sometimes love. So These were computer systems that were meant to do number crunching for stuff like research facilities or universities, or the military, or sometimes really big companies.

Packard Bell hired a former US Air Force meteorologists named Max Palevski to spearhead the computer efforts. Polevski had really begun to study computer science after working with people like von Neumann, so he was coming into this really jazzed. And the first computer that Packard Bell would build would be called the p B two fifty. It was a computer built on the principles of the Automatic Computing Engine or ACE. That the computer system that was designed by

the great Alan Turing himself. The ACE marked the first truly electronic stored program all purpose digital computer. And that's a lot of words, so let's break it down a little bit. The all purpose part is really easy. So early on, engineers built a lot of specific purpose computer systems. These were designed to handle a very narrow spectrum of tasks, and these machines had a streamlined design for that purpose.

Now when I say streamlined, I don't mean in terms of physical structure, because all these machines were big and unwieldy, but rather in terms of the systems architecture what it was actually processing information for. So these specific machines were quite good at handling the problems that fit within their design, but they were incapable of running any other kind of

process outside of that purpose. And all purpose or general purpose computer could run any program within that computer's capabilities, not just a narrow spectrum of programs. Turing's design was ambitious, so much so that his colleagues ultimately decided that they had to compromise on that vision quite a bit when building out the actual computer. Otherwise the engineering requirements were going to just be too severe, so they made a much more modest machine called the Pilot Model ACE. In

nineteen fifty. Packard Bell's p B two fifty followed uh in the design philosophy of ACE. It wasn't exactly a copy, but it was built on those same basic principles. Okay, but what about electronics stored. Well, one thing the PB two fifty sported was magneto restrictive memory, and this was a type of delay line memory for computers. Now, you've probably heard me talk about random access memory or RAM, and if not, I'm sure you've encountered at least the

concept of RAM. RAM is a type of storage that allows computers to process information without pulling it from a hard disk or disk drive. It's a temporary type of storage meant to facilitate calculations to make stuff faster. I sometimes like in it to short term versus long term memory for humans, but that's not really an apples to apples comparison. It's just kind of useful to say. If you have something in your short term memory that's right

there and you're working with it, it's really easy. If you have to remember something that happened a long time ago that takes more time. It's similar to that concept, but it's not a one to one analogy. Well, delay line memory is even different from that. For one thing, it's not random access. Delay line memory is sequential, so the data is organized in the order that it was entered.

It has this predetermined ordered sequence. It's also totally weird when you think about it in context of modern computing. Here's how it worked. In the original incarnation of delay line memory, the system would convert data into sound waves, so it would actually become an acoustic form of information, and then it would send that acoustic wave. These sound waves through a medium that put the brakes on those

sound waves. You know, sound travels at different speeds through different media, right, it travels through water more slowly than it travels through air. For example, in the case of the early delay line memory models, they use tubes of

liquid mercury. The sound waves carrying data would slow down as it would transfer into the liquid mercury, but it would continue traveling until I reached the far end of the tube of mercury, wherein it would hit a sensor that would allow it to re electrify the signal for processing a process. Signal could then be sent back through

the tube. Now you could set up such a system to store that data to it barily, and the way you would do it is you would constantly send the same signal back and forth through the tube until you needed it. The site make likened this to using an

echo to do the same thing. So imagine that you're standing in a canyon and you need to remember something like someone's just told you some numbers and you gotta remember them, so you shout it out really loudly, and a couple of moments later, you hear the echo of your shout coming back to you, So it's like you just remembered the number you yelled out. But hey, that echo is gonna fade away, right, It doesn't stick around forever, and maybe you don't need the information at that exact moment.

So that means after you hear the echo, you need to shout the same thing again to continue to preserve it, and so on and so on until you finally get to the point where you actually have to use that information and then you can stop shouting it back out again. Well, the same thing is happening in delay line memory. The system sends data through this journey because it's going to need that data later. It doesn't need it right now. But let's say the data completes this journey, the computer

still doesn't need the information. Well, then it just repeats the incoming message and sends that data back out on the journey again. One downside of this is that when the computer does need the information, it has to wait for the data to complete whatever leg of the journey it's on, so you can't just call up information instantaneously. There's actually a bit of a delay. Computer systems like the PB two fifty relied on this type of memory as did more well known computers like the UNIVAC one.

It's a pretty interesting way to store information and fundamentally different from how we do it now. So I thought it was pretty darn cool. Not necessarily the most convenient way of doing it, and not necessarily the most satisfying way if you need information right away now, granted, the delay is typically on the order of milliseconds. It might be long enough for there to be a perceptible delay, but it wasn't like you were waiting around forever. But

still it wasn't instantaneous. The PB two fifty did not have a CPU chip, because this was before transistors were a viable option for that kind of thing. Instead, the central processing unit was a series of logic boards that were wired together, and these logic boards processed data one

bit at a time, sequentially. In other words, I've seen a picture of one of these PB two fifty computers and it kind of looks like a pair of large briefcases or the old school style suitcases that are sitting side by side on top of a little pedestal stand, and then there's a typewriter like thing next to it. That typewriter like saying was actually a teleprinter called a Frieden Flexo writer. Super cool old school to tchnology here, but outside the scope of what we're covering, so I'm

gonna leave it be. The computer division of Packard Bell was essentially a subsidiary of the larger Packard Bell Electronics or Packard Bell Corporation. It would continue to make computer systems until nineteen sixty four. That's when the company Ray Theon made Packard Bell Corporation and offer it couldn't refuse. Ray Theon purchased the computer division. By this time, Palevski, the guy who had spearheaded the PB two fifty, he

had already left Packard Bell at this point. He actually took several top level engineers with him all the way back in nineteen sixty one to form another company called Scientific Data Systems of California or STS, that would subsequently get acquired by Xerox by the end of the nineteen

sixties and made Polevski very wealthy. So you might think that it was this computer division of Packard Bell that would ultimately emerge in the nineteen eighties as the company behind all those personal computers, all those IBM clones, And you'd be so totally wrong. I mean, you could argue very convincingly that the Packard Bell of the eighties and nineties fame had nothing whatsoever to do with the original

Packard Bell at all. But it had a little more to do with the Packard Bell Corporation than it did with Packard Bell computers. Now this came as a surprise to me as I was doing this research. I thought, surely this computer division is what ultimately evolved into the Packard Bell PCs. But no, so, Raytheon buys the Packard Bell Computer Division and essentially folds it into the larger company of Raytheon. Raytheon is another company I'm going to

have to cover at some point. It also has a pretty bumpy history, which I guess you could expect from a company that's in the military and defense industry. But we're going to close that chapter of our story here at the Computer division effectively merged into the rest of Raytheon and was no more. So let's get back to the Packard Bell Corporation, the one that was still making

radios and television sets, because that still existed. That parent company soldiered on a little bit longer, but in nineteen sixty eight. So just four years after Raytheon had bought the computer division, a suitor came calling to Packard Bell Corporation, and this was Teleedne. Tele Dine started as a microelectronics and control system company, and it began all the way back in nineteen sixty. By all the way, I mean eight years previously. So tele Dine had a slightly different

strategy when it came to establishing itself. It was not the type of company that built lots of R and D facilities and manufacturing plants. Instead, tele Dine was all about acquiring other already established companies, such was the case with the Packard Bell Corporation. By the end of the nineteen sixties, tele Dine had acquired around one hundred companies. Yikes, it's ten companies a year if you divide it up that way. Now, some people mark this as the death

of the original Packard Bell. Though tele Dine did offer some products with a tele Dine Packard Bell branding into the nineteen seventies, they stopped sometime around nineteen seventy four. So this means we could say Packard Bell's original lifespan was from nineteen twenty six to nineteen sixty eight or nineteen thirty three to nineteen seventy four, or nineteen twenty six to nineteen seventy four, you get it. The company is something of an enigma when it comes to talking

about its lifespan. Between nineteen seventy four and nineteen eighty five, Packard Bell essentially remained nothing more than a brand name owned by tele Dine, but not actually used on anything. There were devotes of the brand, people who loved particular radios or television sets, or collectors who were seeking a specific model to complete their collection. And antique radio scene grew out of Los Angeles and Packard Bell radios were

a top commodity. But otherwise the name was languishing. And that will bring us to the next phase in our story and an Israeli tank driver named Benny Allagam. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay. So Packard Bell had its rise and fall as a radio and television company. Or Bell had resigned from the board back in nineteen sixty two. He remained on as a sort of advisor for a short while, continue to have an office in the Los Angeles headquarters, but he passed away in nineteen seventy.

So how did Packard Bell come back as a brand in the nineteen eighties and what connection did it have to this company? Well, enter Benny Algam. He was born in Israel in nineteen fifty three, and he's generally pretty quiet about his personal history. In fact, he's also pretty quiet about his professional history in a lot of ways. But he attended college in the United States, studying engineering and business at the California State Polytechnic University in the

nineteen seventies. By the early nineteen eighties, he and two other Israeli American businessman, Jason bars Lay and Alex Sandel, formed a company called cal Abco c A L dash a b c O. This was a wholesaler of computer components like memory chips. The early eighties offered a special opportunity for people who were in the computer business. And I've talked about this many times before IBM had dipped

its corporate tow in the world of personal computers. Previously, IBM had marketed almost exclusively to big businesses, but the company explored the PC market by building computers using off the shelf components kind of like the ones that cal Abco sold and landing a license with Microsoft for the DOSS operating system. But here's the kicker. IBM didn't secure an exclusive agreement with Microsoft, which meant Microsoft could license that same operating system or a slight variation of it

to any other computer manufacturer. And since IBM was using off the shelf components rather than designing a proprietary machine built exclusively on IBM technology, this made it possible for anyone with the know how to build similar machines using a similar operating system. And that would mean a customer could go out and buy a less expensive computer from some other manufacturer and still run the same software and

tended for the IBM machines. The first company to do this was Compact in n Two other companies would follow suit, and the era of the IBM clone PC began. We called them clones because they weren't made by IBM, but they could run the same software that was designed for IBM computers. But Allergem and his business partners saw another

opportunity within this world. See these other companies that were making IBM PCs were still aiming primarily at the business market, and that might include some smaller businesses that otherwise would never have invested in computers and not just you know, big corporations, but it was still largely a focus on productivity machines. Alagam and his partners saw the chance to

market to the average American. Now. To do it, he would need a company that could build inexpensive computers at scale and at an efficiency that would allow him to sell PCs at a much lower cost than his competitors. And he wanted a name for this company that would give him a marketing edge. That name would be you guessed it, Packard Bell. Now I'm not sure if Alagam was going after that name with the intent of muddying the waters, but I'm not not saying that that wasn't

the case. See, the name Packard Bell wasn't in frequent use by the nineteen eighties, and it was easy to associate it with other entities. One was Bell Labs, the R and D arm of a T and T. Another was Hewitt Packard, the tech company that had been around since nineteen thirty nine. Or you might even just associate it with the original Packard Bell that made radios and TVs. The marketing for the new PC company definitely leaned into this because their slogan was America grew up listening to us.

It still does, which you know, it seems to at least imply that this is the same company that was making radios and TVs back in the fifties and sixties. But the truth is this new company had nothing to do with any of the other companies, but it did benefit from that association. Alagam purchased the rights to the Packard Bell name from Teledne and the new Packard Bell Company established sometime around nine n six. Another big step

Alagam made was to form partnerships with retailers. Typically, to purchase a computer, you would have to go to like a hobby store or a computer store, which could be pretty intimidating for the average person, or you were ordering direct from a big business because you were placing an order for a company. So in that case, you're like ordering tens or hundreds of computers, not a single computer

for a average person. But Aligam saw the opportunity of reaching a broader customer base by selling computers through consumer retail stores like Sears and Walmart, and later on like Best Buy in Circuit City. He started to form business relationships with these companies and secured agreements to sell Packard Bell PCs in their stores. In return, he would send Packard Bell employees to help train up the store staff on how to understand, talk about, and ultimately how to

sell these PCs. The new Packard Bell would actually be a pioneer in a few fields early on. So, for example, with early PCs, it was pretty standard for a customer to have to install the operating system and any initial software themselves. You would get your computer home, you would have a whole bunch of disks for whatever operating system you were in. You'd have to you know, boot up into the bios and then load up the operating system. Computers didn't come with stuff preloaded on it back in

those days. This was another barrier to entry for a lot of people. Not only were computers expensive, it was intimidating to buy them and to set them up. So in nine seven, Packard Bell became the first IBM PC clone manufacturer to offer computers with a preloaded operating system and software bundle, thus again lowering that barrier of entry. The following year, Packard Bell established a toll free support telephone line so customers could call and get help setting

up or maintaining a computer. In nine, Packard Bell would be the first company to sell computers with Intel's Pentium processor as the CPU, as well as the first to sell a computer with a CD ROM drive. So how was a budget PC company able to get out in front of its competitors in this way? One large part it came back to those business relationships I mentioned earlier.

Customers would have conversations with sales people in stores like Sears, and those sales people would report back and word would get back up the chain to pack or Bell about what customers liked, what they didn't like, what they were looking for. So company executives learned about how people wanted stuff like a machine capable of running a CD ROM and that meant that one it needed to be a Pentium and two they need to include cd ROMs in order to meet that demand. It also helped that Packard

Bell had established an extremely nimble manufacturing process. Everything was really efficient, and reportedly the company was even capable of assembling machines running on one type of component in the morning and then swap out their assembly line to cover a totally different set of components for a different model. By lunchtime, so you can be making say a three eight six computer in the morning and swap over to

pentium by lunch. This is a big deal. Bigger companies couldn't move this fast, so Packard Bell was hearing about customer needs early and then able to respond to them faster than they're larger competitors were capable of doing. The company also tried out different desktop computer designs. The general design philosophy was pretty industrial and utilitarian and boring. Around that time, your standard computer was either a tower or a tabletop PC that took up a good amount of space.

Packard Bell introduced computers with smaller form factors, and they tried to get away from the boring, beige tower design. However, we have to look at some of the bad stuff too. Sure the company was aggressive and producing machines for much lower costs than the competition, but that doesn't mean the machines were good. If you do a search on Packer Bell, you're gonna find a lot of articles that named the company as the worst brand of PCs in the nineteen nineties.

Heck PC magazine, in their Top ten Worst Computers of All Time, listed all Packard Bell computers at number one, not a single model. They said Packard Bell in general was the worst PC. So what was actually going on? Well, a big part of this had to do specifically with quality. A lot of customers were displeased with their purchases, having various components failed. The computer just wasn't working really well. But how much is a lot? Well in, Packard Bell

revealed that it had a return rate of about seventeen percent. Now, the average in the market was closer to seven percent, so this was more than double the average. So nearly twenty percent, or nearly one out of every five computers were being returned to Packard Bell. So their reputation for unreliable computers wasn't exactly unearned. Now, it didn't start out that way. The early computers were considered to be pretty reliable. They weren't exactly premium machines, but for the price, they

were serviceable. However, as chip manufacturers, and really, I guess I should just say Intel, because that's what Packard Bell went with. As Intel produced faster processors, Packard Bell's quality

began to slip. Packard Bell leaned hard on the Intel inside sticker that was placed on every computer because the Intel name gave a lot of cashe to Packard Bell, and the general thought was that a cheap computer with an Intel processor is still better than an expensive computer with some other company's processor in it, like an a m D processor. But that wasn't necessarily true. It's just that was the perception. On top of that, Packard Bell was using a lot of components that were, you know,

a little odd. Some of them were produced by other companies that the owners of Packard Bell also just happened to own. Funny thing that this meant that when one of those parts failed, as they frequently did, you couldn't just go and grab a replacement version off the shelf. You couldn't go and get some generic power source, for example.

You had to order special parts because as those were the ones that would only work with those Packard Bell computers, and they were also typically fairly expensive, they also were not necessarily more reliable than the part you replaced, so you might have to keep replacing the same part with

the same machine if you stuck with it. That meant that Packard Bell didn't get a whole lot of repeat business people would get burned by it, and then they'd say, you know, what I'm going to spend a little more money and go with one of the competitors. Magazines gave the computers bad reviews. Like I mentioned earlier, there was a glut of models Packard Bell models on the market,

and some of them were indistinguishable from each other. You could buy essentially the same Packard Bell computer from Sears or Walmart or Circuit City, but each of those computers would have a different model number that indicated that it was a computer sold through this specific chain. Otherwise they

were all identical, but it got confusing. In nineteen a French company called Group Bull made a deal with Packard Bell that gave Group Well nearly ownership of the company, and another company, and Japanese electronics company called inn e C took pretty much the rest of the ownership of Packard Bell and integrated Packard Bell within EC computers. This would turn out to be what we call a bad decision. See Packard Bell was on the downward slope. The company's

reputation was shot. Everyone associated their computers as being cheap and unreliable technology. The bad reviews were killing sales and competitors were catching up. In addition, combat one of the big competitors to Packard Bell had been accusing Packard Bell of building computers with recycled parts but still selling the computers as if they were brand new, and comback actually filed a lawsuit and stated that this was a case

of unfair competition. An EC would later settle this lawsuit out of court, but the damage was done in part because Packard Bell executives consistently argued that using recycled parts really wasn't that big a deal and why are you so upset man. On top of that lawsuit, there were these new budget like low cost PC companies that were coming out, like E machines. Do you guys remember the machines that also cut into Packard Bell's game by Alagam and n AC were no longer seeing eye too. I

remember NYC came in and essentially bought Packard Bell. So Alagam either left or was forced to leave Packard Bell. He would go on to become a real estate guy, and he spent the last couple of decades trying to build tall condos in Beverly Hills, California, not too very much success. An EC kept pouring money into Packard Bell, but was on the losing side, dropping a couple of billion into the venture overall, before they finally made the decision to shut down US operations entirely and thus only

sell Packard Bell branded machines in Europe. So in two thousand we saw Packard Bell go away. In the United States. In two thousand six, NBC sold Packard Bell to the person who used to own Drumroll Please E machines. Packard Bell was folded under a holding company called PB Holdings, and Lenovo actually entered into talks to acquire this holdings company and thus the Packard Bell brand the following year in two thousand seven, but they were beaten to the

punch by another company. A Sir so Acer took on seventy ownership of PB Holdings, the company that owns the brand Packard Bell. Acer was trying to prevent Lenovo from

getting a foothold in the European market. Now recently here in the United States, a holding company called p b X Holdings purchased the Packard Bell I p and you can actually find very cheap computer with the Packard Bell branding on them again in the United States, but these have no connection to any of the previous Packard Bells, including the personal computers of the nineteen eighties and nine nineties, apart from the name. Now, this again reminds me of Atari.

Atari was a company that got really big, collapsed in on itself, then essentially had its parts sold off, including the names, and after a while, the names were the only thing that really remained. There were no other components from the companies that actually remained with it. It was just the brand name. And you have to ask yourself, is that really the same thing? If all that's left is the name is does it have any meaning to it? And I guess you could argue that for marketing purposes

it still does. But that is the Packard Bell story, a really confusing, weird one that is continuing kind of but really it's like we keep seeing a different James Bond, right exce that every single James Bond has absolutely no connection with any other James Bond. That's kind of how it works. I hope you guys learned something and enjoyed this episode. Like I said at the beginning, if you have suggestions for future topics, reach out to me. You

can let me know on Twitter or on Facebook. The handle for both is text Stuff hs W. You can follow me at John Strickland, j O N S, t R, I, C K, l A, and D on Twitter. I welcome you and make lots of bad jokes and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.