Top five naff PC designs revealed

SO INTEL WANTS designers to go forth and multiply the numbers of PCs that don't look like, well, PCs, with its Core Challenge competition announced earlier this week.

"Intel Corporation is challenging PC designers and manufacturers to think sexy, stylish and small as they design the next generation of home PCs optimized for multimedia entertainment and powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processors," says the press release.

Look, we thought we'd made this clear -- PCs are never sexy. But go on.

"Looking to evolve the big, beige box and help bring to market more stylish, small, quiet and cool-running PCs perfect for any room in the home, Intel announced the Intel Core Processor Challenge. The contest will award up to $1 million in prizes…" A million dead presidents? Yippee! Tell us more.

“… to the PC designer and manufacturer that designs and builds the smallest and most stylish home PCs powered by Intel Viiv technology."

Ech, Viiv, there had to be a catch.

Instead of beige boxes where the only detailing is a thumbscrew and the inscription Made In Taiwan, it would like the coachworks people, trainspotter spods and broad-rimmed spectacles brigade out there to come up with something different, perhaps with an eye on the successes of Apple, Alienware, Voodoo and others that have prospered - and there after acquired in the case of the last twoo -- through judicious use of colourful, noisy, bells-and-whistles encrusted, transparent, Perspex-enshrined, or just white, machines.

Well, that's all very well say traditionalist greybeards sucking thoughtfully on their pipes and reaching for the blueprint folder, but just you bear in mind this Top Five List of Naff PC Designs.

1. ICL's PCTV. Way back in the mists of time, around about 1992, there was a UK PC company that had turned Japanese when acquired by Fujitsu. ICL's PC business was always a bit of a mixed bag but, flush with yen, it had a palpable yearning to storm the sector again. And this time it had a new plan. With PC prices coming down to near the £1,000 mark, how about targeting the infant retail sector? One differentiating idea the Japanese-Brits had was to combine the functionality of a PC with a TV. Of course, just as Intel's Viiv people and Microsoft's Media Centre folks are finding out, the principle suggests that TV usage and PC usage are solo activities. Clue: they're not. These things were winging their way to bargain outlets faster than you could say, ‘what will happen to the ICL brand?'.

2. Black PCs. In the early 1990s, PC clone makers made a startling breakthrough. The Eureka moment was that they could buy not just beige cases but also black ones from their sources on Taipei, thus copying on a grander scale the cool look of the then-IBM ThinkPad. A few tried, suggesting that this could be a wowser for company receptions, trendy firms and the like. In fact, the cases wre crudely sprayed beige cases and they still came with bulbous 14-inch CRT monitors, rats' nest cables and mini-tower boxes like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey, so nearly everybody passed.

3. All-in-one PCs. Apple had done it with the Mac Classic so it had to be A Good Idea to join the monitor to the case. Firm's like Gateway and Brother released these units as tidy alternatives to two-box PCs and, hey, they looked good. The only problem was when something went wrong and you needed access to the innards… Luckily, of course, PCs never go wrong, do they?

2. The PC that looks like a writing desk. Some madman in Taipei thought it a good idea to meld the PC into an Edwardian-style writing desk. These went on sale but were rarely sighted outside of trade shows.

1. Pizza-box PCs. In the 1980s it was widely assumed that laptops would make desktop PCs disappear by now. They haven't but the urge to make things smaller for no apparent reason continues to rage in Man and reached its apogee with pizza-box cases in the early 1990s. It's tiny, you can stand the screen on it... and you need a can-opener to swap a board. µ