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Comment by fred_is_fred | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.

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My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers.

I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.

I remember seeing the department-store Packard Bell PCs on shelves. Packard Hells, I called them. About half of the display models were busted. I'm surprised that uninformed shoppers could remain uninformed after seeing that.

I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something.

Ugh, I despised dealing with that gear.

Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.

Even better, it was a classic zombie brand revival, and it seems like the vast majority of the trusted names of my youth have followed this path.

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