[piano-driven jazz music]
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.
[laptop slowly whirs to life]
[floppy drive grunts]
[beep!]
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.
Because for starters, dude, that name!
The Statesman [chuckles]
How snobby is that?
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,
or just shy of 3 kilograms.
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.
Or States... men.
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
up with a test bench power supply.
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
it can turn off themonitor.
Cheap but effective, I approve.
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.
Well just look at this silliness.
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
with a concave finger bowl on top.
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
G double-clicks the left mouse button.
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,
control-click, delete and ugh whyyy.
This poor keyboard!
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
turned out to be a grayscale model.
Something increasingly uncommon in 1994, but definitely not unheard-of in economy priced
machines like this.
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
itself it’s a world of black and white.
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
display, or DSTN passive matrix.
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
of dual scan means that you can get weird screen tearing since the panel is divided
into two sections refreshing independently.
Of course, what you’re seeing here looks even worse than in-person, these older LCDs
are a nightmare to record.
Either way though, viewing angles and backlight bleed are abysmal.
That’s just the way it goes with mid-90s DSTN displays.
At the time, TFT panels were a lot more expensive,
adding four or five hundred bucks to the manufacturing cost.
So hopefully, whatever you planned to run remained usable with a display that looked
like vaseline coated in drunkenness.
[Goodbye Galaxy sounds beeping]
[unfortunate DSTN-induced death]
However, there’s one thing the Statesman uses that was both affordable and capable,
and that was the CPU inside made by the Cyrix Corporation.
Ahh, Cyrix.
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Throughout the 90s, they were constantly throwing wrenches into the Intel x86 market, beginning
with their FasMath coprocessors and pin-compatible 386 CPUs. Packard Bell made use of each of
those in the Statesman, with the confusingly-named 486SLC being the processor of choice.
Yeah, despite the name it’s actually a souped-up 33 megahertz 386SX of sorts,
with on-chip L1 cache and 486 instructions.
That’s on the original Statesman though, it got better in 1994 with the Statesman Plus,
which is actually what my color model is right here.
The Plus was upgraded with a Cyrix 486SLC2 rated at 50 megahertz,
otherwise everything else remained the same.
It still accepted a coprocessor, the aforementioned Cyrix FasMath, which was their version of
the Intel 80387.
One that reportedly performed twice as fast as Intel’s in some cases.
I’d test that out but I don’t have one of those.
Yet.
What I will test though is TopBench, so we can see what kinda performance we’re getting
out of that 386-based SLC2 CPU.
Sure enough, it earns a score of 64, right in line with a 30MHz Intel 386SX and below
what you’d get on an Intel 486SX at 50MHz.
So not blazing fast, but it cost less than the competition, ran a lot cooler, and required
less power, making it ideal for laptops.
Especially for one specced the way this one is, with a color passive matrix display and
12 megabytes of RAM.
Heh, speaking of RAM check this out, I’ve never seen it installed quite like this before.
You snap off and remove this plastic cover below the LCD to upgrade the memory, revealing
three RAM slots and the battery charging LED.
And the RAM itself comes on these tiny modules
with two orange connectors that snap it into place.
I’ve no idea what this connection is called, but what a neat little design!
Now as for what you can actually do with the Statesman?
Well it’s actually pretty solid for gaming, at least if you’re looking to play specific
types of DOS and Windows games from back then.
Single-screen puzzle games like Tetris or Snake-eqsue arcade games like Pizza Worm are
ideal for example, since the smeary passive matrix display doesn’t completely ruin what’s
going on due to the way those games function.
But side-scrolling platformers?
Eh, not so much.
Even simpler ones like Crystal Caves here suffer immensely on LCD panels like this,
it’s just visually confusing and eye-strainingly painful to look at for very long.
And first person games like Doom, yeesh.
Admittedly, it’s cool that it runs it at all really.
Seeing a 3D game running on a laptop in ‘94 in any way whatsoever
was pretty amazing in and of itself.
But yeah, visually unappealing is putting it mildly with Doom, at least without hooking
it up to an external display.
Oh and in case you’re wondering, nope, it isn’t fast enough to play later 90s shooters
like Duke Nukem 3D.
I mean, it’s got enough RAM, it’ll run it. Technically.
But we’re talking serious slideshow territory, the game is utterly unplayable on this CPU.
Of course, gaming was never the intended usage of the Packard Bell Statesman anyway.
In late ‘93, early ‘94, the kinda folks willing to spend several thousand bucks
on a portable computer?
Chances are the primary purpose wasn’t gaming.
No, the real meat and potatoes of a laptop were things like word processing, keeping
track of finances, maintaining spreadsheets, writing papers for school,
filling out tax returns, that kinda thing.
Or if you had a PCMCIA modem, maybe even dialing into Prodigy or CompuServe, or a local bulletin
board system to send electronic mail and download shareware applications.
And whenever you had some downtime, it came preinstalled with Solitaire, Minesweeper,
and the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, so a quick game of Rodent’s Revenge, Klotzki,
or Tetravex were always tempting diversions residing only a click away.
Yeah man.
As much as I prefer my more capable IBM, Toshiba, or Gateway laptops, I’m still in love with
clunky old dorks like the Packard Bell Statesman.
It’s a fountain of retro personality and charm, stemming directly from its limitations.
These are in kind of a weird spot too, where most collectors don’t wanna bother with
‘em at all, since they don’t have a TFT LCD and the Cyrix CPU is weird and there’s
no sound card or CD-ROM and mleh-nuh-neh. Whatever!
There are tons of better-equipped old laptops out there, I’ve got plenty of myself.
But I also find value and enjoyment in experiencing the limitations of old machines for what they
are, instead of calling them out for what they’re not.
[lid clicks closed]
[lo-fi jazz beats]
And if you enjoyed this 90s computing retrospective?
Well then, welcome home.
I post new LGR videos each week on old computers, software, games, and yeah.
There’s plenty more where this came from.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!