Packard Bell Corner PC

The Packard Bell Corner PC is an oddball PC from the 1995 to 1996 time frame. It was Packard Bell’s attempt to make something that looked a little different from the traditional boxy desktop or tower PC. The exact model number varied between retailers but I know it was sold as the Axcel 459CD or as the PB 2000. But if you just call it the Packard Bell Corner Computer or Corner PC, almost anyone familiar with that era knows what you’re talking about.

The Packard Bell Corner PC sold for $1,299 without a monitor. The least expensive monitors Packard Bell offered sold for around $250, but you could get as much as a 20-inch display for it, which added $1,700 to the price. Yes, the top of the line monitor cost considerably more than the computer.

Bucking convention with the Packard Bell Corner Computer

Packard Bell was already bucking convention with its industrial design, which included a white case and snap-in gray accents that Frog Design came up with for them and introduced in mid-1994. In 1994, virtually all other PC brands were still a neutral light beige color. With the Corner PC, Packard Bell took the nonconformity a step further and built a PC shaped like something other than a box.

It was basically a standard desktop with a corner cut out and the internals moved around to accommodate. It’s variously been designed as triangular, heart shaped, diamond shaped, or L shaped. Whatever you call the shape, it stood 6.25 inches tall and 16.5 inches wide and deep, placing the internal drives at a 90-degree angle from each other.

Under the hood, it was a not-so-unusual 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM, S3 Trio64 video, a 1.44 MB floppy drive, an 8X ATAPI CD-ROM drive, and a hard drive ranging from 850 MB to 1.2 GB depending on when you bought it and what you paid. It used the same motherboard form factor Packard Bell used in its conventional desktop PCs. Notably, the motherboard Packard Bell chose for the corner PC lacked L2 cache, which cut its performance a good 15 percent against PCs with similar specs.

Critical reception

The Packard Bell Corner PC got some press in its day because it looked different. Yet I struggled to find any thorough reviews of it. Magazines like Popular Science mentioned it in their 1995 holiday roundups as a potential gift idea, noting that it was designed to fit in an otherwise disused corner. PC Magazine mentioned it a couple of times as an aside when writing about other Packard Bell machines.

Most likely, the holiday roundup mentions were a little more than a lightly rewritten press release. Because, as modern hobbyists like YouTuber LGR observe, the Corner PC didn’t really fit well in a corner. You could place the leg with the CD-ROM drive directly against the facing wall, but the ports and the fan were on the back of the leg with the floppy drive, so that side needed at least a couple of inches of clearance. And if you actually made the baller move and sprang for the 20-inch monitor and the option that let the monitor double as a television, that big 20-inch CRT wouldn’t fit in the corner.

So while it looked unconventional and different, especially for 1995, the corner design wasn’t very practical and it didn’t catch on. Packard Bell didn’t continue the design for another generation and none of the other large PC makers of the time copied the concept.

Conflicting information on price

Details on the Packard Bell Corner PC are hard to come by, and sometimes conflicting. Pricing information varies, sometimes by a thousand dollars. But that’s not hard to explain.

The 120 MHz Pentium was a high-end CPU at the time and Intel cut prices every quarter. So the price came down considerably between the summer of 1995 when it hit the market and the 1995 holiday season. When released in the spring of 1995, the 120 MHz Pentium sold for $935 in quantities of 1,000. I couldn’t find pricing for late 1995. But in the spring of 1996, a year its release, the price was $188.

In November 1995, Popular Science stated the Packard Bell Corner PC’s price started at $1,299 and could go as high as $2,999. If you bought one in the summer or fall of 1995, both prices were likely to be higher.

I remember seeing ads for the Packard Bell Corner Computer during 1995, but I haven’t been able to locate any preserved examples from my usual sources. Other, more conventional Packard Bell models got more ad space.

Rarity of the Packard Bell Corner PC

Also, by 1995, Packard Bell’s reputation was taking a beating. Their computers sold well while the market was growing, because they targeted first-time PC buyers. They were very good at getting the first sale. They were not very good at getting repeat buyers. Don’t get me wrong, there were people who bought Packard Bells and did fine with them. But their quality was uneven, and they were bad about using unconventionally sized power supplies, so repairing them with off-the-shelf parts wasn’t always an option.

And in 1995, a former employee leaked information that Packard Bell was passing off used components as new. This led to a class action lawsuit that they finally settled in 1998.

Furthermore, taking shortcuts like omitting level 2 cache let them hit lower price points, but it also meant another company that didn’t take such shortcuts could use a slower Pentium and match its performance and deliver better reliability and better value for a similar price. And when you were buying the PC in the store, you’d be able to try the machines out and notice the difference.

So if the Packard Bell Corner PC is rare today, there are a couple of reasons why. It was a curiosity at the time, and not terribly practical. It was an interesting experiment in industrial design, but it looked better in the ads than it did in your house.

Because of its unusual design and scarcity, the Packard Bell Corner Computer is collectible today. It’s an unusual design that failed. And just five years later, Packard Bell was no more, at least in the United States.