What happened to Packard Bell computers? The firm ceased operations in the United States in 2000. Its former rival, Acer, acquired the brand January 31, 2008 for $46 million. It was a once-unimaginable outcome for what had been the top-selling computer brand in the United States.
But there’s more to the story than that. The Packard Bell story is a brilliant piece of marketing. The computers were terrible, but the marketing was as good as it gets. And that’s one of the reasons people remember it as one of the more prominent of the 90s computer brands, even if many who remember it don’t remember it fondly.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
