Speaker 1: Welcome to Text Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And some of you
Speaker 1: might not know this, but I close every single episode
Speaker 1: by giving out the Twitter and Facebook handles for this show.
Speaker 1: Both of those, by the way, our Text Stuff h
Speaker 1: s W. And I invite people to suggest topics for
Speaker 1: me to cover on this show. And some folks actually
Speaker 1: do that, like Andy, who actually sent his suggestion to
Speaker 1: me directly to my personal Twitter account that, by the way,
Speaker 1: is at John Strickland and that's a j O in Strickland. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Andy wrote, you cover Packard Bell before? Probably well, Andy,
Speaker 1: I haven't covered Packard Bell before, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: do it now so that shows you. Well. I gotta
Speaker 1: little confrontational there. I'm sorry Andy to know what came
Speaker 1: over me, but yes, it's time to talk about Packard
Speaker 1: Bell now. For someone my age, the name Packard Bell
Speaker 1: brings to mind an army of IBM PC clones in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and nineties. I'll get into what that
Speaker 1: means later on, but while I think most folks around
Speaker 1: my age associate Packard Bell with inexpensive and frequently mocked
Speaker 1: personal computers. The company's origins, or at least the origins
Speaker 1: of the name of the company, go back much, much further.
Speaker 1: The full story of Packard Bell is one of entrepreneurship, innovation, acquisitions, betrayal, death, resurrections,
Speaker 1: and fading into the sunset only to come back. The
Speaker 1: story shares some parallels with other company stories like a TORII,
Speaker 1: and I'll explain that a little bit further on. For now,
Speaker 1: let's start with a man named Herb Bell. Kind of Now,
Speaker 1: the history of both the company and this founder are
Speaker 1: a bit muddled. Some history state that Packard Bell should
Speaker 1: trace its origins to nineteen twenty six. Others say no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it should be nineteen thirty three. The company itself was
Speaker 1: incorporated in ninety five, according to The New York Times.
Speaker 1: The New York Times also says that Herbert Bell was
Speaker 1: born in eighteen ninety in Rock Valley, Iowa, but other
Speaker 1: sources say he was born in Burlington, Wisconsin. So, as
Speaker 1: you guys can gather, this is a somewhat difficult story
Speaker 1: to tell, but hey, history is more than just dates.
Speaker 1: And places right. So we'll just accept that there is
Speaker 1: some confusion about the details of this history, or that
Speaker 1: we're dealing with a multiverse, parallel dimension situation here. Either
Speaker 1: of those I think work as a get out of
Speaker 1: jail free card in this situation. So when Herb Bell
Speaker 1: was growing up in either Iowa or Wisconsin, he wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily dreaming of building an electronics company. I should add
Speaker 1: he definitely grew up in Burlington. I found newspaper articles
Speaker 1: from Burlington that talked about it. So it might be
Speaker 1: possible that he wasn't born there, but he definitely grew
Speaker 1: up there. Herbert Bell was actually born Herbert Anthony Zwiebel.
Speaker 1: He had four brothers, Arthur, Albert, Elmer, and Willard. Between
Speaker 1: nineteen ten and nineteen fifteen, these brothers all left home
Speaker 1: to quote make their way in the world end quote.
Speaker 1: Herbert left Burlington in nineteen twelve to go to Milwaukee.
Speaker 1: He found work with the Mitchell Automobile Company, where he
Speaker 1: worked until nineteen eighteen, at which point he set out
Speaker 1: to make a company of his own. In partnership with
Speaker 1: his brothers Arthur and Albert, they formed the Zwiebel Brothers Company.
Speaker 1: And they manufactured tires and related equipment for vehicles. A
Speaker 1: bit later, they brought in brother Elmer, also known as Bub,
Speaker 1: and he owned the Bub Body Company. The four brothers
Speaker 1: incorporated the two companies together, forming a voltron of car
Speaker 1: part companies. I guess. In nineteen twenty one, the brothers
Speaker 1: decided to sell this business. They turned it public and
Speaker 1: they handed it over to a new board of directors,
Speaker 1: and they pocketed the cash. They all packed up and
Speaker 1: moved to California because actually their parents had relocated to
Speaker 1: California back in nineteen nineteen, so they were following behind.
Speaker 1: They had made a good amount of money by building
Speaker 1: up their business and then selling it, and so they
Speaker 1: looked for what would come next. For Herbert that would
Speaker 1: end up being electronics. He became interested in the young industry.
Speaker 1: He was just starting to to really flourish in the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles area around this time, so radio was very young.
Speaker 1: The first license radios to stations in the United States
Speaker 1: began to broadcast in nineteen twenty, so this is still
Speaker 1: very very early in the history of radio. And her
Speaker 1: Bell was one of those tech entrepreneurs who would establish
Speaker 1: a well worn tradition. By this time today. He started
Speaker 1: his company in a garage, actually his parents garage to
Speaker 1: be precise. He began to learn how to build radio
Speaker 1: sets and the ins and outs of electronics. His early
Speaker 1: work focused on providing coin operated radio sets for hotel lobbies.
Speaker 1: So imagine that you're in a hotel lobby, there's a
Speaker 1: radio there. You actually have to put a coin in
Speaker 1: and then it will play whatever station you tune it
Speaker 1: to for however long. The coin operation thing lasts interesting concept.
Speaker 1: Herbert made his brother Albert a partner in the business,
Speaker 1: but this early company didn't establish itself, and by nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine it was out of business. Undiscouraged, Herbert Bell
Speaker 1: found a financial partner in a certain Simtir Edward Jackson
Speaker 1: if You're nasty, and together they formed the Jackson Bell
Speaker 1: Radio Company. Jackson Bell radios are to this day sought
Speaker 1: after by collectors. That being said, according to the Radio
Speaker 1: History Museum, Jackson Bell wasn't really in the business of
Speaker 1: manufacturing radios so much as it was all about marketing radios.
Speaker 1: The actual radios, again according to the Radio History Museum,
Speaker 1: were made by a company called Gilfillan Brothers Radio Company.
Speaker 1: Whether Jackson Bell made their own radios or not as
Speaker 1: kind of a moot point, because it wasn't around for
Speaker 1: very long. It got started in nineteen thirty, but it
Speaker 1: was out of business by nineteen three. This was during
Speaker 1: a truly tumultuous time in economic history. In nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: stock prices in the United States began to plummet, leading
Speaker 1: to a massive crash in the market on October. The
Speaker 1: economic all outstretched all around the world and it would
Speaker 1: take a decade to get back to where the market
Speaker 1: had been before the crash. This was the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: I don't see what's so great about it. The Swiebels
Speaker 1: company was, like many others, affected by this fallout, and
Speaker 1: the brothers folded their business. Part of the problem was
Speaker 1: due to a bigger company making some rather broad changes.
Speaker 1: That company was our c A, which I have actually
Speaker 1: covered in previous episodes of Tech Stuff, multiple episodes in fact,
Speaker 1: so you can go back through our archives and listen
Speaker 1: to those. The Swiebel Brothers had a license to sell
Speaker 1: our c A radios, but when the company introduced a
Speaker 1: new type of radio that made the ones that the
Speaker 1: Sweebels had in their inventory completely obsolete. As we will,
Speaker 1: company really began to struggle. Jackson Bell just couldn't really
Speaker 1: do anything. They now had products that were hard to
Speaker 1: sell right at the beginning of a severe economic depress,
Speaker 1: so they couldn't move their inventory, they couldn't afford to
Speaker 1: invest in the new technology, and they just had to
Speaker 1: close up shop as a result. Now, this is why
Speaker 1: some histories say that Packard Bell cannot use nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: six as the starting point, because even though that's when
Speaker 1: Herb got into the electronics gig, the companies he founded
Speaker 1: all ceased to exist by the early nineteen thirties. Herb
Speaker 1: was down, but he wasn't out. He and his brothers
Speaker 1: changed their last name to Bell officially, mostly to americanize
Speaker 1: their names a bit more, even though they were all Americans.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen thirty three, her Bell would strike up
Speaker 1: a new partnership to launch another electronics business, this time
Speaker 1: with a guy named Leon Packard Packard Bell. Packard was
Speaker 1: able to secure investments from his family to start up
Speaker 1: this new business. Some reports say he used a trust fund,
Speaker 1: some say that it was an uncle who lent the money,
Speaker 1: but in any case, he was kind of the cash
Speaker 1: behind the whole business. And again the business was called
Speaker 1: Packard Bell, but Leon Packard wasn't part of this company
Speaker 1: for very long. He apparently got unhappy with the way
Speaker 1: her Bell was pushing things. Bell was aiming for more ambitious,
Speaker 1: more expensive radio sets, and Packard was worried about it
Speaker 1: getting priced out of the market. So Herb would end
Speaker 1: up buying out his partner sometime in either nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four or nineteen thirty five. Again I found sources that
Speaker 1: gave conflicting dates, but it did happen right around that time.
Speaker 1: Now there was no longer a Packard at Packard Bell,
Speaker 1: but the company had established the sort of brand name,
Speaker 1: so rather than mess with that, they stuck with it.
Speaker 1: So Packard was gone, but Packard Bell remained. The first
Speaker 1: product out of Packard Bell, as far as I can determine,
Speaker 1: was a rebranded Jackson Bell tabletop radio called the Model
Speaker 1: thirty five. A tabletop meaning this was a radio that
Speaker 1: could sit on a table, as opposed to a giant
Speaker 1: console radio that was a free standing piece of furniture.
Speaker 1: They still were pretty big and they involved a lot
Speaker 1: of artistry. The cabinets that were made for these these
Speaker 1: radios often are gorgeous. In fact, that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why UH collectors seek out these antique radios. They
Speaker 1: were also very specific to the regions where they were produced.
Speaker 1: I'll say more about that in a second. So Urban
Speaker 1: his brothers maintained close business relationships. And the brothers had
Speaker 1: all founded their own businesses, and we're manufacturing various components
Speaker 1: and her Bell would package them together as finished radio.
Speaker 1: So some of them were making electronics, some of them
Speaker 1: were cabinet makers, and collectively they were all kind of
Speaker 1: creating the pieces that would allow Packard Bell to sell
Speaker 1: finished radios. So Packard Bell was really more of an
Speaker 1: assembly company, not a manufacturer. They took the component it's
Speaker 1: from the other brothers organizations. One interesting thing Bell did,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, was he customized his radios for the
Speaker 1: West Coast region. Remember they were located at a California
Speaker 1: So rather than simply creating a radio with a dial
Speaker 1: that has all the different radio frequencies marked on it,
Speaker 1: he actually listed out the radio stations with their respective frequencies.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you have a radio station called
Speaker 1: we'll just say Bob, and the radio station Bob is
Speaker 1: at a M seven fifty and instead of having it
Speaker 1: saying just a M seven fifty. You would actually write
Speaker 1: out Bob on the dial, so people could dial directly
Speaker 1: to whichever radio station they were interested in. They didn't
Speaker 1: have to hunt through the frequencies. And Bell was primarily
Speaker 1: selling radios to people on or near the West Coast,
Speaker 1: so he could do this. It was called stationizing, and
Speaker 1: he could do it because he wasn't selling radios to
Speaker 1: people in other parts of the world, where the radio
Speaker 1: stations would be totally different, and for those frequencies. It
Speaker 1: would actually take several years before the company would start
Speaker 1: to sell radios beyond this immediate region. The nice thing
Speaker 1: was you didn't have to remember about which station was
Speaker 1: using which frequency. You just set the dial to the
Speaker 1: station you were interested in because things were right there.
Speaker 1: And the story goes that the inspiration for doing this
Speaker 1: all came from Mama Bell. Now I don't mean mob
Speaker 1: Bell the phone company, but rather the mother of the
Speaker 1: Bell brothers. Herbs said that his mother complained about the
Speaker 1: printing on radio dials and that it was too difficult
Speaker 1: for her to read those numbers and thus be able
Speaker 1: to tune the radio to the station she wanted. Packard
Speaker 1: Bell licensed some of our CIA's radio technology and incorporated
Speaker 1: that technology into their own radios. Or Bell led his
Speaker 1: company into establishing a pretty solid reputation upon the outbreak
Speaker 1: of World War Two in Europe. Then Packard Bell began
Speaker 1: to branch out from radios and we're done building components
Speaker 1: and technologies for the US military. One of those technologies
Speaker 1: was the transponder. Now, Packard Bell did not invent the transponder.
Speaker 1: It wasn't created out of Packard Bell. British engineers actually
Speaker 1: created the first transponders, but Packard Bell helped develop them
Speaker 1: and manufacture them. So what the heck is a transponder. Well,
Speaker 1: it's an electronic component. Technically, it's a transceiver that's used
Speaker 1: in aircraft. During World War Two, it served as a
Speaker 1: way for radar stations to identify whether a detected aircraft
Speaker 1: was friendly or not. The idea was actually incredibly simple.
Speaker 1: You would outfit your aircraft with these transponders, which, upon
Speaker 1: receiving a signal, could send out a message that contained
Speaker 1: the identifying information of that aircraft. In fact, it could
Speaker 1: just contain a signal, a simple signal. So essentially this
Speaker 1: plane was saying, hey, it's okay, I'm a buddy, you
Speaker 1: know I'm not I'm not one of the enemy. And
Speaker 1: the British called this tech a parrot transponder. The parrot
Speaker 1: would squawk or send out its message. American engineers called
Speaker 1: it identification friend or foe or I F F for short.
Speaker 1: Creating unique codes for aircraft would come a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but that would help too. So now not only did
Speaker 1: you know, oh, this is a friendly aircraft because it's
Speaker 1: responding to the signal and giving me the appropriate response.
Speaker 1: Now I can actually get specific unique signals, so I
Speaker 1: can say exactly which aircraft it is. Not just that
Speaker 1: it's friendly, but I know which one it is. Even
Speaker 1: if the enemy figured out that Allied planes were sending
Speaker 1: back signals, the odds of them picking an existing signal
Speaker 1: to masquerade as a friendly aircraft would be slim. The
Speaker 1: one big problem was that the transponder signals were strong
Speaker 1: enough to muck up radar stations. So an incoming signal
Speaker 1: from a transponder was powerful enough that it would completely
Speaker 1: cover a radar screen. It was like you had an
Speaker 1: enormous puddle of ink covering up your screen, except it was,
Speaker 1: you know, points of light. So pilots were instructed instead
Speaker 1: to turn on their transponders when they were prompted by
Speaker 1: radio operators. The informal way, as I said, was to
Speaker 1: call this squawking. So to squawk your parrot is to
Speaker 1: turn on your transponder so it sends a message back
Speaker 1: down to the ground. Then you're supposed to turn it
Speaker 1: back off again because you don't want to flood the
Speaker 1: radar stations. Eventually, this technology found its way into civilian
Speaker 1: aircraft and it became a way for air traffic control
Speaker 1: to identify aircraft in specific airspace, and when paired with
Speaker 1: other electronics, the transponder could send back specific information beyond
Speaker 1: just the identity of the aircraft. It could also send
Speaker 1: stuff like that aircraft's altitude, and pilots could set transponders
Speaker 1: to send specific messages when other communications systems failed. If,
Speaker 1: for example, their radio failed, the pilot could set a
Speaker 1: transponder so that the code sent to a t C
Speaker 1: would correspond to an emergency message such as may day,
Speaker 1: or communications are down or even hijack, So pilots can
Speaker 1: squawk if they're in trouble. They can set their transponder
Speaker 1: to that specific code to indicate the issue, so it's
Speaker 1: an emergency system as well as an identification system. Transponders
Speaker 1: are pretty interesting. For one thing, they only allow codes
Speaker 1: with digits between zero and seven, or at least the
Speaker 1: original ones did. But to explain why that is why
Speaker 1: they could only use between zero and seven would take
Speaker 1: a bit more time away from our topic. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to spare you. Guys. You're welcome, but maybe someday
Speaker 1: I'll go into a full episode about transponders. So you've
Speaker 1: been warned, But for now, let's take a quick break. Okay.
Speaker 1: Packard Bell continues to put together radios and make military
Speaker 1: components all throughout World War Two, and the company was
Speaker 1: doing pretty well. Like it wasn't going gangbusters, but it
Speaker 1: was profitable. It was still focused on that regional market,
Speaker 1: so it's still making radio sets for people on the
Speaker 1: West coast of the United States, still going with that
Speaker 1: stationized approach to the dials. After the war, Packard Bell
Speaker 1: finally incorporated, at least according to The New York Times
Speaker 1: in its obituary for her Bell spoiler alert or Bell
Speaker 1: passed away a long time ago. But Packard Bell also
Speaker 1: began to enter into a new industry. They began to
Speaker 1: get into television manufacturing. Television's back then were similar to
Speaker 1: the old school radios. They tended to be pretty large
Speaker 1: pieces of furniture, often housed in cabinets. The earliest ones
Speaker 1: I know about from Packard Bell were three models that
Speaker 1: the company introduced in nineteen. Two of those were console models,
Speaker 1: essentially the cabinet style. I was just talking about these
Speaker 1: free standing pieces of furniture that had television sets inside them.
Speaker 1: The third model was a tabletop model, and so in
Speaker 1: this case, the television was inside a wooden frame another
Speaker 1: like wooden cabinet, but it was small enough to sit
Speaker 1: on a table as opposed to stand freely on its own.
Speaker 1: The screen on the tabletop model, and the smaller of
Speaker 1: the two console models was ten inches on the diagonal,
Speaker 1: just ten one zero. The larger console had a twelve
Speaker 1: inch screen. It also had a radio and a phonograph
Speaker 1: built into this thing. I imagine it had to be
Speaker 1: a bit of a monster. The company would continue producing television's,
Speaker 1: branching into color TV a decade later, and I've covered
Speaker 1: how TV works several times, so don't worry, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna go on a how television works tangent here. Packard
Speaker 1: Bell found success in the television market, just as it
Speaker 1: had with the radio market, and before long the company
Speaker 1: was selling its products across the United States. This also
Speaker 1: meant finally abandoning that stationized approach to radio dials, because
Speaker 1: now the frequencies weren't corresponding to the same radio stations.
Speaker 1: There was no guarantee that the person who was buying
Speaker 1: your radio would have access to the exact same radio
Speaker 1: stations as what you were putting on the dial, so
Speaker 1: they get rid of that. By the mid nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: things were good enough with Packard Bell for them to
Speaker 1: go public, with the company to go from private company
Speaker 1: to publicly traded company, or Bell would step down as president,
Speaker 1: but he would remain on the board of directors for
Speaker 1: several more years. In the meantime, the company wanted to
Speaker 1: stretch a bit more to get into some other industries,
Speaker 1: and so they created a new division focused on building
Speaker 1: out computers. Now this was still in the late nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: so we're not talking about personal computers here. We're talking
Speaker 1: about many computers, kind of the the bridge between mainframe
Speaker 1: systems and the desktop machines that we would later know
Speaker 1: and sometimes love. So These were computer systems that were
Speaker 1: meant to do number crunching for stuff like research facilities
Speaker 1: or universities, or the military, or sometimes really big companies.
Speaker 1: Packard Bell hired a former US Air Force meteorologists named
Speaker 1: Max Palevski to spearhead the computer efforts. Polevski had really
Speaker 1: begun to study computer science after working with people like
Speaker 1: von Neumann, so he was coming into this really jazzed.
Speaker 1: And the first computer that Packard Bell would build would
Speaker 1: be called the p B two fifty. It was a
Speaker 1: computer built on the principles of the Automatic Computing Engine
Speaker 1: or ACE. That the computer system that was designed by
Speaker 1: the great Alan Turing himself. The ACE marked the first
Speaker 1: truly electronic stored program all purpose digital computer. And that's
Speaker 1: a lot of words, so let's break it down a
Speaker 1: little bit. The all purpose part is really easy. So
Speaker 1: early on, engineers built a lot of specific purpose computer systems.
Speaker 1: These were designed to handle a very narrow spectrum of tasks,
Speaker 1: and these machines had a streamlined design for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Now when I say streamlined, I don't mean in terms
Speaker 1: of physical structure, because all these machines were big and unwieldy,
Speaker 1: but rather in terms of the systems architecture what it
Speaker 1: was actually processing information for. So these specific machines were
Speaker 1: quite good at handling the problems that fit within their design,
Speaker 1: but they were incapable of running any other kind of
Speaker 1: process outside of that purpose. And all purpose or general
Speaker 1: purpose computer could run any program within that computer's capabilities,
Speaker 1: not just a narrow spectrum of programs. Turing's design was ambitious,
Speaker 1: so much so that his colleagues ultimately decided that they
Speaker 1: had to compromise on that vision quite a bit when
Speaker 1: building out the actual computer. Otherwise the engineering requirements were
Speaker 1: going to just be too severe, so they made a
Speaker 1: much more modest machine called the Pilot Model ACE. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty. Packard Bell's p B two fifty followed uh
Speaker 1: in the design philosophy of ACE. It wasn't exactly a copy,
Speaker 1: but it was built on those same basic principles. Okay,
Speaker 1: but what about electronics stored. Well, one thing the PB
Speaker 1: two fifty sported was magneto restrictive memory, and this was
Speaker 1: a type of delay line memory for computers. Now, you've
Speaker 1: probably heard me talk about random access memory or RAM,
Speaker 1: and if not, I'm sure you've encountered at least the
Speaker 1: concept of RAM. RAM is a type of storage that
Speaker 1: allows computers to process information without pulling it from a
Speaker 1: hard disk or disk drive. It's a temporary type of
Speaker 1: storage meant to facilitate calculations to make stuff faster. I
Speaker 1: sometimes like in it to short term versus long term
Speaker 1: memory for humans, but that's not really an apples to
Speaker 1: apples comparison. It's just kind of useful to say. If
Speaker 1: you have something in your short term memory that's right
Speaker 1: there and you're working with it, it's really easy. If
Speaker 1: you have to remember something that happened a long time
Speaker 1: ago that takes more time. It's similar to that concept,
Speaker 1: but it's not a one to one analogy. Well, delay
Speaker 1: line memory is even different from that. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it's not random access. Delay line memory is sequential, so
Speaker 1: the data is organized in the order that it was entered.
Speaker 1: It has this predetermined ordered sequence. It's also totally weird
Speaker 1: when you think about it in context of modern computing.
Speaker 1: Here's how it worked. In the original incarnation of delay
Speaker 1: line memory, the system would convert data into sound waves,
Speaker 1: so it would actually become an acoustic form of information,
Speaker 1: and then it would send that acoustic wave. These sound
Speaker 1: waves through a medium that put the brakes on those
Speaker 1: sound waves. You know, sound travels at different speeds through
Speaker 1: different media, right, it travels through water more slowly than
Speaker 1: it travels through air. For example, in the case of
Speaker 1: the early delay line memory models, they use tubes of
Speaker 1: liquid mercury. The sound waves carrying data would slow down
Speaker 1: as it would transfer into the liquid mercury, but it
Speaker 1: would continue traveling until I reached the far end of
Speaker 1: the tube of mercury, wherein it would hit a sensor
Speaker 1: that would allow it to re electrify the signal for
Speaker 1: processing a process. Signal could then be sent back through
Speaker 1: the tube. Now you could set up such a system
Speaker 1: to store that data to it barily, and the way
Speaker 1: you would do it is you would constantly send the
Speaker 1: same signal back and forth through the tube until you
Speaker 1: needed it. The site make likened this to using an
Speaker 1: echo to do the same thing. So imagine that you're
Speaker 1: standing in a canyon and you need to remember something
Speaker 1: like someone's just told you some numbers and you gotta
Speaker 1: remember them, so you shout it out really loudly, and
Speaker 1: a couple of moments later, you hear the echo of
Speaker 1: your shout coming back to you, So it's like you
Speaker 1: just remembered the number you yelled out. But hey, that
Speaker 1: echo is gonna fade away, right, It doesn't stick around forever,
Speaker 1: and maybe you don't need the information at that exact moment.
Speaker 1: So that means after you hear the echo, you need
Speaker 1: to shout the same thing again to continue to preserve it,
Speaker 1: and so on and so on until you finally get
Speaker 1: to the point where you actually have to use that
Speaker 1: information and then you can stop shouting it back out again. Well,
Speaker 1: the same thing is happening in delay line memory. The
Speaker 1: system sends data through this journey because it's going to
Speaker 1: need that data later. It doesn't need it right now.
Speaker 1: But let's say the data completes this journey, the computer
Speaker 1: still doesn't need the information. Well, then it just repeats
Speaker 1: the incoming message and sends that data back out on
Speaker 1: the journey again. One downside of this is that when
Speaker 1: the computer does need the information, it has to wait
Speaker 1: for the data to complete whatever leg of the journey
Speaker 1: it's on, so you can't just call up information instantaneously.
Speaker 1: There's actually a bit of a delay. Computer systems like
Speaker 1: the PB two fifty relied on this type of memory
Speaker 1: as did more well known computers like the UNIVAC one.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty interesting way to store information and fundamentally
Speaker 1: different from how we do it now. So I thought
Speaker 1: it was pretty darn cool. Not necessarily the most convenient
Speaker 1: way of doing it, and not necessarily the most satisfying
Speaker 1: way if you need information right away now, granted, the
Speaker 1: delay is typically on the order of milliseconds. It might
Speaker 1: be long enough for there to be a perceptible delay,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't like you were waiting around forever. But
Speaker 1: still it wasn't instantaneous. The PB two fifty did not
Speaker 1: have a CPU chip, because this was before transistors were
Speaker 1: a viable option for that kind of thing. Instead, the
Speaker 1: central processing unit was a series of logic boards that
Speaker 1: were wired together, and these logic boards processed data one
Speaker 1: bit at a time, sequentially. In other words, I've seen
Speaker 1: a picture of one of these PB two fifty computers
Speaker 1: and it kind of looks like a pair of large
Speaker 1: briefcases or the old school style suitcases that are sitting
Speaker 1: side by side on top of a little pedestal stand,
Speaker 1: and then there's a typewriter like thing next to it.
Speaker 1: That typewriter like saying was actually a teleprinter called a
Speaker 1: Frieden Flexo writer. Super cool old school to tchnology here,
Speaker 1: but outside the scope of what we're covering, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna leave it be. The computer division of Packard Bell
Speaker 1: was essentially a subsidiary of the larger Packard Bell Electronics
Speaker 1: or Packard Bell Corporation. It would continue to make computer
Speaker 1: systems until nineteen sixty four. That's when the company Ray
Speaker 1: Theon made Packard Bell Corporation and offer it couldn't refuse.
Speaker 1: Ray Theon purchased the computer division. By this time, Palevski,
Speaker 1: the guy who had spearheaded the PB two fifty, he
Speaker 1: had already left Packard Bell at this point. He actually
Speaker 1: took several top level engineers with him all the way
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty one to form another company called
Speaker 1: Scientific Data Systems of California or STS, that would subsequently
Speaker 1: get acquired by Xerox by the end of the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and made Polevski very wealthy. So you might think
Speaker 1: that it was this computer division of Packard Bell that
Speaker 1: would ultimately emerge in the nineteen eighties as the company
Speaker 1: behind all those personal computers, all those IBM clones, And
Speaker 1: you'd be so totally wrong. I mean, you could argue
Speaker 1: very convincingly that the Packard Bell of the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties fame had nothing whatsoever to do with the original
Speaker 1: Packard Bell at all. But it had a little more
Speaker 1: to do with the Packard Bell Corporation than it did
Speaker 1: with Packard Bell computers. Now this came as a surprise
Speaker 1: to me as I was doing this research. I thought,
Speaker 1: surely this computer division is what ultimately evolved into the
Speaker 1: Packard Bell PCs. But no, so, Raytheon buys the Packard
Speaker 1: Bell Computer Division and essentially folds it into the larger
Speaker 1: company of Raytheon. Raytheon is another company I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to cover at some point. It also has a
Speaker 1: pretty bumpy history, which I guess you could expect from
Speaker 1: a company that's in the military and defense industry. But
Speaker 1: we're going to close that chapter of our story here
Speaker 1: at the Computer division effectively merged into the rest of
Speaker 1: Raytheon and was no more. So let's get back to
Speaker 1: the Packard Bell Corporation, the one that was still making
Speaker 1: radios and television sets, because that still existed. That parent
Speaker 1: company soldiered on a little bit longer, but in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. So just four years after Raytheon had bought
Speaker 1: the computer division, a suitor came calling to Packard Bell Corporation,
Speaker 1: and this was Teleedne. Tele Dine started as a microelectronics
Speaker 1: and control system company, and it began all the way
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty. By all the way, I mean
Speaker 1: eight years previously. So tele Dine had a slightly different
Speaker 1: strategy when it came to establishing itself. It was not
Speaker 1: the type of company that built lots of R and
Speaker 1: D facilities and manufacturing plants. Instead, tele Dine was all
Speaker 1: about acquiring other already established companies, such was the case
Speaker 1: with the Packard Bell Corporation. By the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, tele Dine had acquired around one hundred companies. Yikes,
Speaker 1: it's ten companies a year if you divide it up
Speaker 1: that way. Now, some people mark this as the death
Speaker 1: of the original Packard Bell. Though tele Dine did offer
Speaker 1: some products with a tele Dine Packard Bell branding into
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, they stopped sometime around nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: So this means we could say Packard Bell's original lifespan
Speaker 1: was from nineteen twenty six to nineteen sixty eight or
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three to nineteen seventy four, or nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: six to nineteen seventy four, you get it. The company
Speaker 1: is something of an enigma when it comes to talking
Speaker 1: about its lifespan. Between nineteen seventy four and nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: Packard Bell essentially remained nothing more than a brand name
Speaker 1: owned by tele Dine, but not actually used on anything.
Speaker 1: There were devotes of the brand, people who loved particular
Speaker 1: radios or television sets, or collectors who were seeking a
Speaker 1: specific model to complete their collection. And antique radio scene
Speaker 1: grew out of Los Angeles and Packard Bell radios were
Speaker 1: a top commodity. But otherwise the name was languishing. And
Speaker 1: that will bring us to the next phase in our
Speaker 1: story and an Israeli tank driver named Benny Allagam. But first,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Okay. So Packard Bell had
Speaker 1: its rise and fall as a radio and television company.
Speaker 1: Or Bell had resigned from the board back in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two. He remained on as a sort of advisor
Speaker 1: for a short while, continue to have an office in
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles headquarters, but he passed away in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: So how did Packard Bell come back as a brand
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties and what connection did it have
Speaker 1: to this company? Well, enter Benny Algam. He was born
Speaker 1: in Israel in nineteen fifty three, and he's generally pretty
Speaker 1: quiet about his personal history. In fact, he's also pretty
Speaker 1: quiet about his professional history in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But he attended college in the United States, studying engineering
Speaker 1: and business at the California State Polytechnic University in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. By the early nineteen eighties, he and two
Speaker 1: other Israeli American businessman, Jason bars Lay and Alex Sandel,
Speaker 1: formed a company called cal Abco c A L dash
Speaker 1: a b c O. This was a wholesaler of computer
Speaker 1: components like memory chips. The early eighties offered a special
Speaker 1: opportunity for people who were in the computer business. And
Speaker 1: I've talked about this many times before IBM had dipped
Speaker 1: its corporate tow in the world of personal computers. Previously,
Speaker 1: IBM had marketed almost exclusively to big businesses, but the
Speaker 1: company explored the PC market by building computers using off
Speaker 1: the shelf components kind of like the ones that cal
Speaker 1: Abco sold and landing a license with Microsoft for the
Speaker 1: DOSS operating system. But here's the kicker. IBM didn't secure
Speaker 1: an exclusive agreement with Microsoft, which meant Microsoft could license
Speaker 1: that same operating system or a slight variation of it
Speaker 1: to any other computer manufacturer. And since IBM was using
Speaker 1: off the shelf components rather than designing a proprietary machine
Speaker 1: built exclusively on IBM technology, this made it possible for
Speaker 1: anyone with the know how to build similar machines using
Speaker 1: a similar operating system. And that would mean a customer
Speaker 1: could go out and buy a less expensive computer from
Speaker 1: some other manufacturer and still run the same software and
Speaker 1: tended for the IBM machines. The first company to do
Speaker 1: this was Compact in n Two other companies would follow suit,
Speaker 1: and the era of the IBM clone PC began. We
Speaker 1: called them clones because they weren't made by IBM, but
Speaker 1: they could run the same software that was designed for
Speaker 1: IBM computers. But Allergem and his business partners saw another
Speaker 1: opportunity within this world. See these other companies that were
Speaker 1: making IBM PCs were still aiming primarily at the business market,
Speaker 1: and that might include some smaller businesses that otherwise would
Speaker 1: never have invested in computers and not just you know,
Speaker 1: big corporations, but it was still largely a focus on
Speaker 1: productivity machines. Alagam and his partners saw the chance to
Speaker 1: market to the average American. Now. To do it, he
Speaker 1: would need a company that could build inexpensive computers at
Speaker 1: scale and at an efficiency that would allow him to
Speaker 1: sell PCs at a much lower cost than his competitors.
Speaker 1: And he wanted a name for this company that would
Speaker 1: give him a marketing edge. That name would be you
Speaker 1: guessed it, Packard Bell. Now I'm not sure if Alagam
Speaker 1: was going after that name with the intent of muddying
Speaker 1: the waters, but I'm not not saying that that wasn't
Speaker 1: the case. See, the name Packard Bell wasn't in frequent
Speaker 1: use by the nineteen eighties, and it was easy to
Speaker 1: associate it with other entities. One was Bell Labs, the
Speaker 1: R and D arm of a T and T. Another
Speaker 1: was Hewitt Packard, the tech company that had been around
Speaker 1: since nineteen thirty nine. Or you might even just associate
Speaker 1: it with the original Packard Bell that made radios and TVs.
Speaker 1: The marketing for the new PC company definitely leaned into
Speaker 1: this because their slogan was America grew up listening to us.
Speaker 1: It still does, which you know, it seems to at
Speaker 1: least imply that this is the same company that was
Speaker 1: making radios and TVs back in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 1: But the truth is this new company had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with any of the other companies, but it did
Speaker 1: benefit from that association. Alagam purchased the rights to the
Speaker 1: Packard Bell name from Teledne and the new Packard Bell
Speaker 1: Company established sometime around nine n six. Another big step
Speaker 1: Alagam made was to form partnerships with retailers. Typically, to
Speaker 1: purchase a computer, you would have to go to like
Speaker 1: a hobby store or a computer store, which could be
Speaker 1: pretty intimidating for the average person, or you were ordering
Speaker 1: direct from a big business because you were placing an
Speaker 1: order for a company. So in that case, you're like
Speaker 1: ordering tens or hundreds of computers, not a single computer
Speaker 1: for a average person. But Aligam saw the opportunity of
Speaker 1: reaching a broader customer base by selling computers through consumer
Speaker 1: retail stores like Sears and Walmart, and later on like
Speaker 1: Best Buy in Circuit City. He started to form business
Speaker 1: relationships with these companies and secured agreements to sell Packard
Speaker 1: Bell PCs in their stores. In return, he would send
Speaker 1: Packard Bell employees to help train up the store staff
Speaker 1: on how to understand, talk about, and ultimately how to
Speaker 1: sell these PCs. The new Packard Bell would actually be
Speaker 1: a pioneer in a few fields early on. So, for example,
Speaker 1: with early PCs, it was pretty standard for a customer
Speaker 1: to have to install the operating system and any initial
Speaker 1: software themselves. You would get your computer home, you would
Speaker 1: have a whole bunch of disks for whatever operating system
Speaker 1: you were in. You'd have to you know, boot up
Speaker 1: into the bios and then load up the operating system.
Speaker 1: Computers didn't come with stuff preloaded on it back in
Speaker 1: those days. This was another barrier to entry for a
Speaker 1: lot of people. Not only were computers expensive, it was
Speaker 1: intimidating to buy them and to set them up. So
Speaker 1: in nine seven, Packard Bell became the first IBM PC
Speaker 1: clone manufacturer to offer computers with a preloaded operating system
Speaker 1: and software bundle, thus again lowering that barrier of entry.
Speaker 1: The following year, Packard Bell established a toll free support
Speaker 1: telephone line so customers could call and get help setting
Speaker 1: up or maintaining a computer. In nine, Packard Bell would
Speaker 1: be the first company to sell computers with Intel's Pentium
Speaker 1: processor as the CPU, as well as the first to
Speaker 1: sell a computer with a CD ROM drive. So how
Speaker 1: was a budget PC company able to get out in
Speaker 1: front of its competitors in this way? One large part
Speaker 1: it came back to those business relationships I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: Customers would have conversations with sales people in stores like Sears,
Speaker 1: and those sales people would report back and word would
Speaker 1: get back up the chain to pack or Bell about
Speaker 1: what customers liked, what they didn't like, what they were
Speaker 1: looking for. So company executives learned about how people wanted
Speaker 1: stuff like a machine capable of running a CD ROM
Speaker 1: and that meant that one it needed to be a
Speaker 1: Pentium and two they need to include cd ROMs in
Speaker 1: order to meet that demand. It also helped that Packard
Speaker 1: Bell had established an extremely nimble manufacturing process. Everything was
Speaker 1: really efficient, and reportedly the company was even capable of
Speaker 1: assembling machines running on one type of component in the
Speaker 1: morning and then swap out their assembly line to cover
Speaker 1: a totally different set of components for a different model.
Speaker 1: By lunchtime, so you can be making say a three
Speaker 1: eight six computer in the morning and swap over to
Speaker 1: pentium by lunch. This is a big deal. Bigger companies
Speaker 1: couldn't move this fast, so Packard Bell was hearing about
Speaker 1: customer needs early and then able to respond to them
Speaker 1: faster than they're larger competitors were capable of doing. The
Speaker 1: company also tried out different desktop computer designs. The general
Speaker 1: design philosophy was pretty industrial and utilitarian and boring. Around
Speaker 1: that time, your standard computer was either a tower or
Speaker 1: a tabletop PC that took up a good amount of space.
Speaker 1: Packard Bell introduced computers with smaller form factors, and they
Speaker 1: tried to get away from the boring, beige tower design. However,
Speaker 1: we have to look at some of the bad stuff too.
Speaker 1: Sure the company was aggressive and producing machines for much
Speaker 1: lower costs than the competition, but that doesn't mean the
Speaker 1: machines were good. If you do a search on Packer Bell,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find a lot of articles that named the
Speaker 1: company as the worst brand of PCs in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Heck PC magazine, in their Top ten Worst Computers of
Speaker 1: All Time, listed all Packard Bell computers at number one,
Speaker 1: not a single model. They said Packard Bell in general
Speaker 1: was the worst PC. So what was actually going on? Well,
Speaker 1: a big part of this had to do specifically with quality.
Speaker 1: A lot of customers were displeased with their purchases, having
Speaker 1: various components failed. The computer just wasn't working really well.
Speaker 1: But how much is a lot? Well in, Packard Bell
Speaker 1: revealed that it had a return rate of about seventeen percent. Now,
Speaker 1: the average in the market was closer to seven percent,
Speaker 1: so this was more than double the average. So nearly
Speaker 1: twenty percent, or nearly one out of every five computers
Speaker 1: were being returned to Packard Bell. So their reputation for
Speaker 1: unreliable computers wasn't exactly unearned. Now, it didn't start out
Speaker 1: that way. The early computers were considered to be pretty reliable.
Speaker 1: They weren't exactly premium machines, but for the price, they
Speaker 1: were serviceable. However, as chip manufacturers, and really, I guess
Speaker 1: I should just say Intel, because that's what Packard Bell
Speaker 1: went with. As Intel produced faster processors, Packard Bell's quality
Speaker 1: began to slip. Packard Bell leaned hard on the Intel
Speaker 1: inside sticker that was placed on every computer because the
Speaker 1: Intel name gave a lot of cashe to Packard Bell,
Speaker 1: and the general thought was that a cheap computer with
Speaker 1: an Intel processor is still better than an expensive computer
Speaker 1: with some other company's processor in it, like an a
Speaker 1: m D processor. But that wasn't necessarily true. It's just
Speaker 1: that was the perception. On top of that, Packard Bell
Speaker 1: was using a lot of components that were, you know,
Speaker 1: a little odd. Some of them were produced by other
Speaker 1: companies that the owners of Packard Bell also just happened
Speaker 1: to own. Funny thing that this meant that when one
Speaker 1: of those parts failed, as they frequently did, you couldn't
Speaker 1: just go and grab a replacement version off the shelf.
Speaker 1: You couldn't go and get some generic power source, for example.
Speaker 1: You had to order special parts because as those were
Speaker 1: the ones that would only work with those Packard Bell computers,
Speaker 1: and they were also typically fairly expensive, they also were
Speaker 1: not necessarily more reliable than the part you replaced, so
Speaker 1: you might have to keep replacing the same part with
Speaker 1: the same machine if you stuck with it. That meant
Speaker 1: that Packard Bell didn't get a whole lot of repeat
Speaker 1: business people would get burned by it, and then they'd say,
Speaker 1: you know, what I'm going to spend a little more
Speaker 1: money and go with one of the competitors. Magazines gave
Speaker 1: the computers bad reviews. Like I mentioned earlier, there was
Speaker 1: a glut of models Packard Bell models on the market,
Speaker 1: and some of them were indistinguishable from each other. You
Speaker 1: could buy essentially the same Packard Bell computer from Sears
Speaker 1: or Walmart or Circuit City, but each of those computers
Speaker 1: would have a different model number that indicated that it
Speaker 1: was a computer sold through this specific chain. Otherwise they
Speaker 1: were all identical, but it got confusing. In nineteen a
Speaker 1: French company called Group Bull made a deal with Packard
Speaker 1: Bell that gave Group Well nearly ownership of the company,
Speaker 1: and another company, and Japanese electronics company called inn e
Speaker 1: C took pretty much the rest of the ownership of
Speaker 1: Packard Bell and integrated Packard Bell within EC computers. This
Speaker 1: would turn out to be what we call a bad decision.
Speaker 1: See Packard Bell was on the downward slope. The company's
Speaker 1: reputation was shot. Everyone associated their computers as being cheap
Speaker 1: and unreliable technology. The bad reviews were killing sales and
Speaker 1: competitors were catching up. In addition, combat one of the
Speaker 1: big competitors to Packard Bell had been accusing Packard Bell
Speaker 1: of building computers with recycled parts but still selling the
Speaker 1: computers as if they were brand new, and comback actually
Speaker 1: filed a lawsuit and stated that this was a case
Speaker 1: of unfair competition. An EC would later settle this lawsuit
Speaker 1: out of court, but the damage was done in part
Speaker 1: because Packard Bell executives consistently argued that using recycled parts
Speaker 1: really wasn't that big a deal and why are you
Speaker 1: so upset man. On top of that lawsuit, there were
Speaker 1: these new budget like low cost PC companies that were
Speaker 1: coming out, like E machines. Do you guys remember the
Speaker 1: machines that also cut into Packard Bell's game by Alagam
Speaker 1: and n AC were no longer seeing eye too. I
Speaker 1: remember NYC came in and essentially bought Packard Bell. So
Speaker 1: Alagam either left or was forced to leave Packard Bell.
Speaker 1: He would go on to become a real estate guy,
Speaker 1: and he spent the last couple of decades trying to
Speaker 1: build tall condos in Beverly Hills, California, not too very
Speaker 1: much success. An EC kept pouring money into Packard Bell,
Speaker 1: but was on the losing side, dropping a couple of
Speaker 1: billion into the venture overall, before they finally made the
Speaker 1: decision to shut down US operations entirely and thus only
Speaker 1: sell Packard Bell branded machines in Europe. So in two
Speaker 1: thousand we saw Packard Bell go away. In the United States.
Speaker 1: In two thousand six, NBC sold Packard Bell to the
Speaker 1: person who used to own Drumroll Please E machines. Packard
Speaker 1: Bell was folded under a holding company called PB Holdings,
Speaker 1: and Lenovo actually entered into talks to acquire this holdings
Speaker 1: company and thus the Packard Bell brand the following year
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven, but they were beaten to the
Speaker 1: punch by another company. A Sir so Acer took on
Speaker 1: seventy ownership of PB Holdings, the company that owns the
Speaker 1: brand Packard Bell. Acer was trying to prevent Lenovo from
Speaker 1: getting a foothold in the European market. Now recently here
Speaker 1: in the United States, a holding company called p b
Speaker 1: X Holdings purchased the Packard Bell I p and you
Speaker 1: can actually find very cheap computer with the Packard Bell
Speaker 1: branding on them again in the United States, but these
Speaker 1: have no connection to any of the previous Packard Bells,
Speaker 1: including the personal computers of the nineteen eighties and nine nineties,
Speaker 1: apart from the name. Now, this again reminds me of Atari.
Speaker 1: Atari was a company that got really big, collapsed in
Speaker 1: on itself, then essentially had its parts sold off, including
Speaker 1: the names, and after a while, the names were the
Speaker 1: only thing that really remained. There were no other components
Speaker 1: from the companies that actually remained with it. It was
Speaker 1: just the brand name. And you have to ask yourself,
Speaker 1: is that really the same thing? If all that's left
Speaker 1: is the name is does it have any meaning to it?
Speaker 1: And I guess you could argue that for marketing purposes
Speaker 1: it still does. But that is the Packard Bell story,
Speaker 1: a really confusing, weird one that is continuing kind of
Speaker 1: but really it's like we keep seeing a different James Bond,
Speaker 1: right exce that every single James Bond has absolutely no
Speaker 1: connection with any other James Bond. That's kind of how
Speaker 1: it works. I hope you guys learned something and enjoyed
Speaker 1: this episode. Like I said at the beginning, if you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future topics, reach out to me. You
Speaker 1: can let me know on Twitter or on Facebook. The
Speaker 1: handle for both is text Stuff hs W. You can
Speaker 1: follow me at John Strickland, j O N S, t R, I,
Speaker 1: C K, l A, and D on Twitter. I welcome
Speaker 1: you and make lots of bad jokes and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.