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Hilarious Industrial Design Fails: Weird PCs from the '90s

As 3D modeling proliferated, some wielded it for evil

By Rain Noe - January 28, 2016

in Consumer Electronics

Some of you may have forgotten and some of you never lived it, but there were some truly horrific designs for PC towers in the mid to late '90s. Before I say any more, have a look at some of these gems helpfully narrated by Lazy Game Reviews:

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Now obviously some of these, like the Corner PC, are just the result of an incompetent industrial designer (or a designer under the thumb of a clueless market research team). But what's interesting is that others essentially have the software used to design them written all over them.

What I mean by that is, CAD was still not widespread in the early '90s. When you went into ID firms of the time, you still saw drafting boards, T-squares and ship's curves. In other words, drafting things with an excessive amount of curves, or things that had compound curves in three dimensions, was a royal pain in the ass.

But once 3D modeling started to work its way in there in the mid-'90s, it was suddenly easy to create organic shapes, whether or not it made any sense to add arbitrary curves to a thing. My theory is that some of the designers of the time could not help themselves, and that "form follows function" went out the window because they were too excited at being able to create forms like…this:

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So our industry began cranking out things, I believe, that reflected what the software was newly capable of, rather than sticking with principles of good design. We let the technology get the better of us, and some companies paid the price. So let that serve as a lesson!

o

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Mike McGuire

8 years ago

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As a senior editor for this blog, I would have assumed you had greater insight into design history. The corner PC was not, "...just the result of an incompetent industrial designer." It was very likely the result of concerted effort to design for the context of computers at that time. The CRT monitors of that era were substantially larger and deeper and took up immense desk space. This corner design was actually a novel configuration that provided greater space in front of the monitor by organizing internal components in a non-rectangular configuration. (The typical rectangular configuration of the time would take up more space if it was aligned with the faceplate to the operator and aligned into the corner beneath the monitor. ) The round monitor stand component was actually removable for smaller monitor usage. So no, it wasn't likely the result of incompetence; probably the opposite. And the resulting form probably also had nothing to do with 3D modelling.

The Amiga, by contrast, WAS a 3D modelling machine. It was one of the earliest PC's I was aware of to have modelling software built into it. Video and music editing too, many years ahead of the competition. And they always looked different from the windows clones that existed at the time. While it may have come to existing through 3D modelling, I'd suggest that it's unique (?) form was the result of early lifestyle PC design intent. Something designed with marketing position and end-user taste in mind. Hardly enabled because of 3d modelling.

M.

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Douglas Bowker

8 years ago

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Well, some companies never did learn...

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Dee An

8 years ago

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It maybe didn't help that early 90s CAD workstations from Silicon Graphics were strangely curvy and oddly coloured!

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Dee An

8 years ago

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Most of those machines are new to me, except the TAM and the Mega-PC. Good video!
If you dig out YouTube videos of the Apple TAM, you'll see Jony Ive with a bit more hair than we are used to seeing him with! Around this time he was thinking of leaving Apple, but that was just prior to Steve Jobs returning.

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