Packard Bell
More info
- Creator
- Beny Alagem (the PC company)
- Released
- 1986
- Successor
- Acquired by Acer in 2008
The cheap home PC from the department store, built on a borrowed radio brand and a reputation worse than the machines.
The name came from a Los Angeles radio maker founded in the 1920s. Beny Alagem bought the brand in 1986 because it sounded familiar and trustworthy, and it helped that people confused it with Hewlett-Packard. The strategy was to sell complete PC bundles with preinstalled software through ordinary retail chains, where the competition wasn't on the shelves, and by the mid-1990s Packard Bell was the best-selling home PC brand in the US.
Margins were thin and quality was uneven. The company was accused of putting used components into machines sold as new. NEC bought in, and the two PC businesses merged in 1996. Packard Bell left the US market in 2000 but lived on in Europe until Acer bought the brand in 2008.