Packard-Bell, as you see it, is simply not the company it used to be. As with so many American company names, someone bought the name. I think (do not quote me on any of this!) that originally it was two seperate entities - Packard Instrument and Bell Sound. The former was around in the 1950s, and made test equipment for the nuclear industry. Bell Sound may have been earlier, as they made Speech Amplifiers for the World War Two U.S. Navy model TBL radio transmitters. Eventually Packard-Bell was formed, and made all sorts of things, including a small family of minicomputers in the early 1960s. RCS/RI has one of the machines, a pb250. I have no idea what happened to Packard-Bell. They may still be around, doing defense work, or they may have been swallowed up. The Packard-Bells at CompUSA, however, are simply not related. By the way, Packard-Bell has nothing to do with HP. William Donzelli william(a)ans.net