Packard Bell Corner Computer: One of 1995's Strangest PCs

my grandma told me what a weird, weird place the '90s were...... but i never believed her!!!! 🫨🫨🫨

SORRY, GRANDMA!!!!!! 🥹🥹🥹😢

I supported Packard Bell machines from 2003-07 but I don't believe I ever came across this particular one. We were forever sending out replacement Motherboards & PSU's... there was also the tattoo process that that was a common situation..

If you mod this to have more additional ports on the top and bottom faces, it will literally not have any useful sides at all!

I wanted this corner c back in tbd day. ❤

At some point you gotta show cable TV playing through a machine like this.

Does it rotate around on a hidden turntable?

Good lord that harddrive is close to giving up the ghost haha

Great video!

Man i remember this sheesh!!! In Dixons!

We had an NEC multimedia tower that had a remote that you could use to make phone calls via the modem

It is missing the Microphone... I had this very Creature... It was Wonderful for Newbies but Just find an open IRQ for Expanding... I Dare You to get even one additional CD or Expansion card to run in it !

I watch this and think of what the Tesla engineers must be stuck with trying to build Elon’s cyber truck and wonder if things have really improved over time on the whole aesthetic vs practicality debate.

Beautiful for that era but not than Macintosh performa

"cutting edge" yeah, an edge was cut out

That’s because the houses built in the mid to late 90s didn’t have a straight wall imside!😂

Packard Bell: America grew up listening to us. It still does.

That computer looks sick IMO

Would fit perfect in my toilet ! 😍👌

Try upgrading to Windows 7

That thing is so adorable I love it

Just came here to say WTF!!! from the thumbnail picture. I think they modeled its look from a cutout picture of an old disk drive. Just....wierd.
...then someone thought it would be a good idea to stick the motherboard in sideways in a vertical case under the desk instead.

great video. I had a non-Corner PB in 1996- I had the Spiderman cd along with Encarta and several others. the production of all these CDS made the experience so nice, since there was plenty of things to do without needing to go online. had only 8MB of RAM and 100MHZ but it still ran fine.

We where selling those quit successul as i remember. I loved the special design. It was just different looking than everything else in the shop.

What a great setup

This is so cozy, thank you.

My God, the hours and hours I spent playing Doom and Duke Nukem, I wonder how many people used to squint at the porn mag covers in the shops in Duke Nukem to see if they could refine the image lol, not me Honestly! ha ha ha. And YES, I did have the 'Nude' patch for Tomb Raider, Sad or what lol

I'm pretty sure I had two of these when I was a kid, one for me and one for my sister.

Spider-Man "Cartoon Creator" should have been called "Comic Creator", but it actually looked cool, and I would've played with it for hours.

Had one similar to this in the mid 90s, with the monitor mounted speakers. It was a total POS, something got corrupted and we had to call packard bell customer support to reinstall everything from the restore disk. Could barely play any games, but that didn't stop me from trying. Eventually I got into AOL and the warez scene and was pirating everything I could get my hands on, even stuff I couldn't use. Good times, but wow was that computer a TOTAL LEMON!

Those packard bell BTC keyboards were a godsend in the era of mushy membrane keyboards. People call them the poor man's Topre for a reason; google what those go for, and yes they do feel amazing and arguably better than many mech switch keyboards out there.

Honestly, never having seen this before, I absolutely love the corner design.

Ah that windows 95 startup sound always hits with an nostalgia attack

the hours of my child hood I wasted screwing around on spider man cartoon maker! haha seemed to be a go to on sick days from school.

1st time i saw someone playing Doom with a TV remote 😅

Nice

I worked at Best Buy in the computer department in 94 and 95 and remember this thing. I don't remember selling any of these, but we did sell a bunch of the Acer Green and Grey PCs. I had a green Acer pizza box and always wished I had gotten the green tower.

My cousin had one of these when I was a kid in the 90's. I remember thinking it was super-awesome and amazingly powerful (my family only had a Cyrix DX2 knock-off that ran at a paltry 54 mhz). I felt like the luckiest kid in the world when I got to dog-sit their house when they went on vacation one summer. I got to beat the original Dark Forces game. I should have known it would become a collectable. But, then again, PCs just looked weird back then. It was a thing.

wow that wavetable absolutely blew my mind, omg, why did i spend 4k on a blade with rtx 3080 ti.

My first computer was a Packard Bell with 166mhz Pentium had to upgrade a 4mb graphic card and had 16mb ram . Funny i could play Unreal Tournament 1999 but not my friend that had a Pentium 2 with 444mhz .

I loved the Packard Bell it never had problems . Sadly the beautiful beige color changed to yellow . My speakers were the same as in this video but there was bass & treble. But yeah the sound quality was very poor but back then we were happy and weren't as demanding like today .

I remember the price for my first computer it was 65000 Belgium francs to compare this as being at around 1250Euros . Yes very expensive for a basic desktop , today you can have cheaper for the similar needs at around 350Euros and 650Euros .

I miss those times when you had to unbox that computer and read 5or8 big instruction books that came with it before using the thing lol . We all were nervously excited back then . ( today i don't feel the same magic anymore when i buy a new computer or other electronic objects it's sad ☹ )

Brings back so many good memories❤❤❤

Navigator was one of the best things to play with on our '95.

You make a modern pc in that case would be awesome

That is gorgeous, need a remake of that, keep the crt

off rip, i feel like a computer like this should have been in classrooms and business offices and stuff like that: places where people frequently shift their computer to one side for desk space, and often already turn to type! i can think of many teachers i had growing up that would have grate my benefitted from this sorts things (but i’m only a minute in,)