Name: $2,400 Laptop From 1994: Packard Bell Statesman
Uploaded: 2020-05-08T18:26:16.000Z
Duration: 12 min 38 s
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Greetings and welcome to another LGR laptop thing!

This time around we've got this delightful beige beastie:

a Packard Bell 810400 series,  known as the Statesman.

It may not look like much, but this thing cost a whopping $2,400 when it hit store shelves

around January of 1994, or about $4,200 adjusted for inflation.

And that's without any RAM or coprocessor upgrades.

Just a 33 megahertz 486SLC processor, 4 megabytes of RAM, a 640x480 color display, and up to

200 megabytes of hard disk space running MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1.

Shoutout to longtime LGR viewer Justin for donating this one he found at a thrift store

a while back, as it's one of those machines that wasn't on my collecting radar at all.

And now that I have one and have spent the last couple weeks going down a retro tech

rabbit hole, I'm rather happy to have a Statesman.

Packard Bell may have been known for their budget-minded computers

but that didn't stop them choosing the yuppiest of names.

Same with the Statesman's smaller sibling, the Diplomat: a tiny-for-the-time subnotebook

that was arguably the more exciting offering in '94.

Making computers as small and lightweight as possible was the new hotness in the mid-90s,

and while the Diplomat fit that bill, the Statesman?

Heh, despite its relatively compact size it weighs in at 6 pounds 9 ounces,

Not that the design of the Statesman or the Diplomat could be fully attributed to Packard

Bell, as they were both rebadged offerings from Zenith Data Systems.

The Statesman was Control-C Control-V'd from the ZDS Z-Star 433, the most notable

difference being the logo on the case and the retailer selling it.

Yeah, Packard Bell and Zenith Data Systems

had quite the close relationship in the early 90s.

Leading to them acquiring ZDS for $650 million in 1996,

in what was the PC industry's largest ever merger at the time.

The whole Packard Bell story is worth a video on its own

but yeah, today it's all about the Statesman.

This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them!

Really I just grabbed this other one for the power supply and the spare parts, but lo and

behold, it works perfectly fine after you remove or disable the battery.

If you leave its 1700 milliamp hour nickel-cadmium battery in there when it's dead, these Statesmen

won't power at all, and get stuck in a faulty charge loop.

And yeah, when I got my first Statesman it didn't have a power supply, and due to its

slightly funky 4-pin mini-DIN power connector,

I didn't have many options for getting it working.

So the original 21 volt AC adapter is a must-have here, unless you feel like rigging something

The rest though is all mercifully standard stuff, starting around back with a parallel

printer port, a 9-pin serial port, and a 15-pin VGA output port for external displays.

Note there's no line out or headphone jack though.

The Statesman machines don't have a sound card, only an internal PC speaker.

It kind of looks like it'd have stereo speakers above the keyboard, near the power button

and brightness/contrast controls, but nope.

They're only half-cosmetic cooling vents.

Oh and look at this cute little button below the LCD screen!

You're not meant to press it, it's just how the computer knows the top is closed so

On the left side is a Type II PC Card slot, a ubiquitous 1990s expansion option letting

you connect modems, sound cards, storage media and so on.

Then on the right side is a slim 3.5” high density floppy drive supporting 1.44 meg disks,

along with a PS/2 port for connecting an external mouse.

Something you'll feel compelled to use straight away, cuz uh.

Folks, say hello to the J-Mouse, the input method of choice

on Zenith and Packard Bell laptops for a fleeting moment in time.

Kinda similar in concept to the IBM TrackPoint nub, but almost certainly worse in practice.

Pressing down the J key on the keyboard for a second activates the mouse cursor, and you

move its position by nudging the key from side to side.

It doesn't tilt or rock in place, it just feels like a normal J key

And it works about as well as it looks, so... not well at all.

Especially since the key mechanisms themselves are low-quality, rubbery garbage.

Furthermore, there's all these other keys for different mouse buttons and clicking combos.

Spacebar and F left clicks, the D key right clicks, S is the middle mouse button, and

And it doesn't stop there, as you can see from this friendly training program.

You get commands for things like copy, paste, undo, shift-click,

It's cumbersome enough with its weird little keys all cramped in place with a weird layout,

but then the J-Mouse keys are performing triple duty on top of that!

We'll get back to your oddness another day, J-Mouse, I'm not done with you yet.

Another feature I didn't anticipate was that this second Statesman

Something increasingly uncommon in 1994, but definitely not unheard-of in economy priced

Inside is the same 512K Chips & Technologies 65520 VGA chipset as the higher-end Statesman,

but it only displays things in shades of gray, regardless of the actual color of your programs.

As a result, companies like Packard Bell often included a “reverse” function key, so

you can invert the colors as needed since some programs look better in reverse grayscale.

Being that it's still technically displaying color though, you can use the VGA port to

hook it up to a color monitor and see everything as vibrantly as intended, but on the laptop

That being said, the color Statesman is no bastion of usability either.

256 colors are nice and all, but it's still just a 9.5” dual scan supertwist nematic

It's a slight step up from standard STN displays, but still, bleh.

Awful contrast, poor saturation, plentiful ghosting and smearing, and the very nature

Subtitles ListPlay Video

$2,400 Laptop From 1994: Packard Bell Statesman

weird

plenty

utterly

kinda