The Rise and Fall of Packard Bell: The King of 90s Computing That Vanished

In 1985, a thirty-two-year-old named Beny Alagem paid less than $100,000 for something that did not exist: two words that had belonged to a 1930s radio maker, with no factory, no patent, and no product attached. Ten years later, Packard Bell was the best-selling personal computer brand in the United States — ahead of Compaq, ahead of IBM, ahead of Apple. Discover how Packard Bell built America's biggest PC company without inventing anything, by putting computers somewhere no other manufacturer would put them: Sears, Wal-Mart, Price Costco and Montgomery Ward, on the same shop floor as the washing machines, sold to families who had never owned a computer in their lives. This video explores the Chatsworth start-up years, the Navigator interface that drew a computer as rooms in a house, the retail channel Packard Bell came to dominate, and the return counter that came with it — the 1995 lawsuit from Compaq, the state investigations that followed, and the $5 million multi-state settlement in 1996 that was reached with no admission of wrongdoing. It also traces the money: Groupe Bull, then NEC, then the Zenith Data Systems deal, and the hundreds of billions of yen that NEC's own filings record going into the business. By 1998 a new rival was selling computers in the same aisle for under $500, and by 1999 the audited accounts showed machines leaving the factory for less than the parts and labour inside them. On 3 November 1999 Packard Bell was pulled out of the American PC market. The name survived — and in 2008 it ended up owned by Acer.