[rescue] Wow, 30k Graphics Card From Sun

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Bill Bradford wrote:

> > Am I the only one that remembers Packard Bell as the company making
> > good, high quality 386 clones?
>
> What universe are YOU from?

Their early machines were actually built quite well.  Their 286s were
extremely well-shielded and very expandable.  Their 386s were a bit
spotty.  The larger ones were okay.  The tiny ones (in the form factor
that was just wider than a 13" monitor) were proprietary crap.

I have an old 486SX made by them, and it was certainly acceptable for the
era.  Not the best machine by any standards (stupid DRAM controller that
could only see 1MB SIMMs), but it was amazingly compatible with everything
I plugged into it (including CPU upgrades), and everything that was
onboard could be disabled either in the BIOS configuration, or with
jumpers.

They even had great technical support.  The wait times were horrible, but
they spent hours as they walked me through memory, hard drive, and CPU
upgrades the first time, back when I was a clueless newbie.

That box ran DOS 5.0 through 6.2, OS/2 2.1 and 3.0, Windows 3.1 through
95, and Slackware Linux, all without complaint.  In that same timeframe,
many machines would have trouble running Windows 95, and wouldn't run
something as exotic as OS/2 at all.

However, when they changed their logo and "image", everything went to
shit.  They stopped shipping genuine rebadged MS mice, and shipped cheap
weightless crap (hollow fucking mice balls--evil); the keyboard also lost
about threee pounds.  They started introducing all-in-one multimedia cards
that were all-or-nothing, so, if you upgraded to something faster than the
9600bps modem, you have to upgrade your sound card and CD-ROM drive (since
the built-in drive wasn't always Masushita or Panasonic).  They managed to
invent a case even worse than the Sun Ultra 10 or newer Compaq "home
computers".

Rather than bundling full manuals, interactive tutorials, and useful
backup discs, they shipped electronic manuals, "user experience"
software (their own MS Bob clone), and "Multimedia master discs" that
didn't let you reinstall individual programs.  Even their unlimited free
(toll-free, even!) technical support became pay-only.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "gnu: we aim to fuck up everything with the potential to not suck"
                                                   --alex j avriette