Support NeoGAF

[RetroGamingUK]

Browsing my local Curry’s (UK electronics retailer) and passing by the PC section, it was quite interesting to see it’s now dominated by Chinese/Taiwanese brands like Lenovo, Asus, Acer and MSI.

It got me wondering what happened to all the old brands we grew up with, back in the 90s when I was into PC (before switching to Mac), I was familiar with American brands like IBM, Compaq and Packard Bell (a very popular brand in the UK).

Now, all that remains of those classic American brands is HP and Dell.

So which of the d fancy brand PCs did you own? What did you think of them?

 

[DKehoe]

The first PC my family got was a Time one. As a kid I remember thinking it was fun that we owned a "Time Machine."

 

[RetroGamingUK]

My first ever computer was an IBM Aptiva E- Series from 1997, it came with Win95 and the excellent RTS; Dark Reign.

I think being the original PC brand may have swayed my parents at the time, however comparing it to other PCs at the time there wasn’t really anything unique about it, it certainly didn’t have the more home-friendly curvy aesthetic of contemporaries at the time, which is probably a reason why IBM’s popularity plummeted in the late 90s.

Windows 95 was unreliable trash (much better once I upgraded to XP) though I still love that start tune.

I certainly did shake the walls with that Rusted Root song

 

[The Lunch Legend]

Anyone remember eMachines?

 

[RetroGamingUK]

 

[Banjo64]

We had a family Vaio laptop which was very sleek and slim and felt way ahead of any laptop I’d used at the time.

 

[RavageX]

Anyone remember eMachines?

That was actually the first PC I was able to buy with my own money as a teen(?). It ran Windows ME......

 

[RetroGamingUK]

We had a family Vaio laptop which was very sleek and slim and felt way ahead of any laptop I’d used at the time.

I really liked the aesthetic of Sony’s PCs, it’s a shame they exited the market (along with seemingly the rest of Japan).

 

[AJUMP23]

I had a Compaq, a Gateway, and HP. We may have had a Tandy at some point.

 

[IntentionalPun]

The PC that really got me into PC gaming was a Gateway 386DX33 that I later added a math co-processor to and a secondary (2D) graphics card (VIper or something maybe?) Made that thing last way past it's expiration date, as my next PC was a Pentium 2 I think.

As a really little kid we had an early OG x86 PC whose name I can't remember though.

 

[Quasicat]

My first PC was used that I got for a great deal, but my first new PC I bought was a Compaq Presario, which I bought right after high school. I loved that thing and kept it going as long as I could through grad school. After I left college I looked for a new one only to find that they went out of business.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

The first PC my family got was a Time one. As a kid I remember thinking it was fun that we owned a "Time Machine."

They had a retail store in my city centre in the late 90s.

When me and my friend started playing with one of the desktops an employee with a thick Scottish accent came over, told us to stop playing with it and said “Nooooo, you’ve got to have a looaaaannn!”



Good fucking riddence

 

[winjer]

None. I always built my own PCs.

 

[Trogdor1123]

I had an Emachine years ago. Was trash. Built my own since then.

 

[Xyphie]

We had:

IBM AT (286)
Compaq (486)
AST (Pentium)
Compaq (PIII)
Fujitsu (P4)

TIL Fujitsu still makes computers.

 

[Makoto-Yuki]

first ever PC we had was a Packard Bell with Windows 95. don’t know where my dad got it from. He then upgraded to a new one with Windows 98 which was still a PB.

After that I remember he bought a desktop PC from Tesco (supermarket). That was an eMachine with XP.

He then bought himself a £1,000 laptop from Dixons. This must’ve been around 2002-2003. After that all we had were laptops. We both had laptops with Vista on it but I can’t remember what make they were. I had a MacBook from 2008-2012 then an Acer laptop from 2012-2015.

After that I built my first PC in feb 2015. Got my gaming PC and MacBook Air currently

 

[RetroGamingUK]

first ever PC we had was a Packard Bell with Windows 95. don’t know where my dad got it from. He then upgraded to a new one with Windows 98 which was still a PB.

After that I remember he bought a desktop PC from Tesco (supermarket). That was an eMachine with XP.

He then bought himself a £1,000 laptop from Dixons. This must’ve been around 2002-2003. After that all we had were laptops. We both had laptops with Vista on it but I can’t remember what make they were. I had a MacBook from 2008-2012 then an Acer laptop from 2012-2015.

After that I built my first PC in feb 2015. Got my gaming PC and MacBook Air currently

Packard Bell were huge in the UK in the late 90s.

Being dirt cheap and sponsoring Leeds United certainly helped.

So many kids at my school had one of the below machines, they were ubiquitous and iconic to teens back then like the basic iPad is to teens now.

They were unreliable trash though, which killed the brand.

 

[Makoto-Yuki]

Packard Bell were huge in the UK in the late 90s.

Being dirt cheap and sponsoring Leeds United certainly helped.

So many kids at my school had one of the below machines, they were ubiquitous and iconic to teens back then like the basic iPad is to teens now.

They were unreliable trash though, which killed the brand.

Fuck yeah I remember them sponsoring Leeds lol.

I loved my old desktop. I tried playing games on it but it wasn’t great lol. My favourite was this bike game. Can’t remember exact name but some like Motor Madness. Tried flight sim on it as well lol. I blew the sound on it because I plugged my guitar amp into it trying to record it! My dad had to buy a sound card for it.

This looks like the eMachine I had

 

[Drew1440]

Our family PC was a Time, Pentium II model I think. Lasted about four years until it's power supply gave in. We then just upgraded to Toshiba laptops (now Dynabook)
My local school always used RM desktops with Celerons, some did have custom networking software on them which I forgot the name of. They eventually switched to Dell/HP with standard Windows XP.

I still see Advent desktops around Currys/PC World, and my local Aldi used to sell Medion desktops at one point.
Packard Bell's used to be cool with their navigator software, they eventually got bought out and were an exclusive Curry's brand in the UK, their desktops however were really rebranded OEM parts. You could reflashing the bios with its oem equivalent and overclock them if you wanted to.

eMachines were always fun to fix, their PSUs would often be the main culprit, along with removing the tons of preinstalled adware.

And who could forget Gateway with their cow styled boxes.

 

[drganon]

My grandparents had a compaq presario with windows 95. I thought it was the coolest thing as a kid.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

My local school always used RM desktops with Celerons, some did have custom networking software on them which I forgot the name of.

Wow, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

I remember in primary school in the early 90s there were a few RM Nimbus machines knocking about before they got replaced with Windows 3 machines with CD-ROMs around 1993 (remember Tesco computers for schools?)

 

[Fermbiz]

 

[Rival]

My first computer was a packard bell 486 dx2 50mhz that I think had 1mb of video memory. My brother upgraded that for me so I could play the 7th guest if I remember correctly.

 

[DAHGAMING]

Packard Bell mandem stand up tall .

 

[Marlenus]

I have always DIYd but I used to have a sound blaster and my 1st proper GPU was a Guillemot Voodoo Banshee.

I also had an Nforce 2 motherboard at one point back when Nvidia made motherboard chipsets.

 

[YCoCg]

Built for myself but other family members got the ones I voted for so I've used them. Fuck not heard of Tiny and Time in decades, remember Trust hardware too? You knew you were fancy back then if you had Trust PC speakers instead of the shitty defaults.

 

[OmegaSupreme]

I had a Compaq in the 90s. Horizontal with the crt on top. Good memories of playing Diablo for hours on it. I always wanted a gateway. I'm amazed both of those brands died off. They seemed so huge back then.

 

[TransTrender]

Where's HP on the list?
HP ended up eating Compaq but you still need that HP option.

 

[Warnen]

Viao laptops were the best. I remember playing the Star Wars MMO (1st one not the bioware one) on one with an external gpu.

 

[Aesius]

Had a Packard Bell very similar to this:

Intel 66mhz 486dx2 with 4 MB RAM and a 500 MB HD. We got it Christmas 1995 and it was already slow as balls by then. Some of my friends had PCs with Pentiums and they ran circles around mine. Still, I loved the damn thing. Spent countless hours fiddling with it and fucking around with stuff in Windows Explorer that didn't need fucking with.

In late 2000 we finally got a new computer with a 600mhz Pentium III, which felt blazing fast in comparison. A few years after that, I put a 1 ghz chip in it, increased the RAM, formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows, etc. My parents thought I was a god because of how much faster it became.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

What a glorious time the 80s and 90s were for tech.

I remember going to Costco/Price Club to mess with the Presario's and HP PC's. Then going to the N64 and trying out Mario Kart.

Don't get me started on KB Toys.

 

[poppabk]

None of them. All my PCs back then were pre-builts from computer shops although the idea of a pre-built didn't really exist back then.

 

[Illiterate Actual]

First a Franklin (I think it was Sears store-brand?) and then in 1993 a Packard Bell. Upgraded the RAM and added a CD-ROM and sound card myself, so after that I figured why not do my own builds which I guess must have started in 1997. Pentium II and Monster 3D (3DFX).

 

[EverydayBeast]

Loading things back than was a battle, I remember YouTube in 2006, 7, 8 on a gateway PC

 

[ReBurn]

Of this list Packard Bell and Gateway 2000. The first IBM PC clone I bought for myself was a Packard Bell desktop. A lot of my early PC's were custom built by local computer shops instead of branded pre-builts.

 

[rm082e]

I had a no-name 486 machine assembled from spare parts my buddy's dad brought home from his work. He was the "PC guy" at a big energy company at a time when the guys in IT would just write whatever they wanted out of inventory and take home. I got that in 1994 and it had Windows for Workgroups on it.

I later bought a Pentium II machine from Dell that I paid way too much for. After that I always built my own computers.

 

[MikeM]

Family laptop was a Compaq. I remember playing Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and Doom on that thing as a young lad.

My first gaming PC was a Gateway. Ended up putting a 6600GT in it back in the day- my first PC mod. BFG 6600GT at that.

 

[tkscz]

My first brand new desktop was an old Compaq Presario that looked like this

But more purple than Blue. The power supply died and you couldn't actually get into these things to get parts out. Ended up replacing it with an HP.

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

I worked on so many Compaq, Packard bell, e-machine, and gateway units, while they were ok from a hardware perspective (not you compaq...you were awful) it was the new "adopters" (read people who were buying PC's for the first time) that were the largest issue.

The number of broken cd drives that I had to replace because people used them as coffee cup holders (or in some cases dip-spit/chewing tobacco cup holders) was in-fucking-sane.

 

[NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt]

It wasn't a Gaming PC Brand but Sony Vaio back when they used to be a good company

 

[Rival]

I had a Compaq in the 90s. Horizontal with the crt on top. Good memories of playing Diablo for hours on it. I always wanted a gateway. I'm amazed both of those brands died off. They seemed so huge back then.

I remember buying a Dell back when I was in college but kept going back and forth between that and a Gateway. Went with the Dell because it was a bit cheaper. My older brother got a pretty nice Gateway computer when he went to school and I was insanely jealous. Though my dad did buy me a Sega CD around then I guess to make up for it.

 

[El Muerto]

First pc was an old Tandy 1000 and me and my brothers couldnt figure it out. Then we got a gateway with an 386 cpu and soundblaster, had a lot of fun on that machine. Downloaded almost every game from cdos.org and gamehippo.com back in the day. Spent alot of time on zsnes and nesticle. Then got a compaq with a pentium 4. Then after that started building my own pcs.

 

[dispensergoinup]

I remember going to the BX as a teen and fawning over the Tandy, Amiga, and Packard Bell PC setups.

At home my dad would let me mess around with the VIC-20, C64, then the Zenith 8088 he brought home from work and from then on I built my own PC from parts (salvaged from PB, Compaq, HP, etc.)

386, 486, Pentiums! The future, future, future....!

 

[jshackles]

Anyone remember eMachines?

it's never obsolete

 

[eddie4]

Damn, my first PC was a Packard Bell that my parents bought, from Sears.

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

Sad that Tandy isn't on your poll. That's what we had... with no internal hard disk, just double 5.25-inch floppy drives.

 

[Gp1]

My parents bought one of these in 1995. These bad boys were expensive as as a popular car where i live.
We run it for a decade in one function or another it until the hardware give up and it went to the trash.

Legend says that the speakers (mine were the round version, awesome piece of hardware) and keyboard were still working until this day.

 

[Grizzled Ghost]

I didn't even realize Vaio made PCs. I thought they were strictly a laptop brand.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Where's HP on the list?
HP ended up eating Compaq but you still need that HP option.

HP are still going, in fact they’re the second best selling brand these days after Lenovo.