Acer has revived the dormant Packard Bell brand, attaching it to a range of new products including a laptop, a mobile phone and a turntable.

Packard Bell was probably best known for its boxy, beige PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, although the brand’s heritage spans back 100 years, which is why Acer has decided to bring the name out of retirement.

Acer claims the “refreshed” brand, which it acquired in 2008, has been “built around a single shape: the dot.” Hence, the name of its new product lines all have the word “Dot” at the start of their name.

The one closest to the company’s late 20th century heritage is the DotBook, a 14.5in laptop that is pitched at the lower end of the market occupied by Apple’s MacBook Neo and rivals such as the Dell XPS 13. Acer claims the laptop is built for “browsing, streaming and everyday work" and is a hark back to the “first netbooks that made Packard Bell a fixture in family homes.”

Netbooks were a class of low-cost laptops that were launched in the early 2000s, and the Packard Bell DotBook will go on sale from €499 ($578) in Europe this September, with no word yet on whether the brand will return to its American roots.

More Packard Bell Products

Other products in the “first wave” of devices to be launched this fall include:

  • The DotLoop , an old-school suitcase vinyl turntable that’s designed for the living room.
  • The DotLine , a 4G “feature phone” that Acer claims is designed for “families and digital-balance seekers". In other words, it’s unlikely to support modern Android apps.
  • The DotLook , which the company describes as “audio glasses” that can “handle music and calls without any earbuds or screen.”

Other products in the line-up include a speaker, headphones, a keyboard and mouse set and a ring light.

Acer claims the relaunch of the brand is timed to coincide with the centenary of the brand, which it says was founded in Los Angeles in 1926.

That appears to be playing a little loose with the timeline. Herb Bell, one of the original founders of the company, had indeed been in the radio electronics industry since 1926, according to Wikipedia , but the Packard Bell Corporation wasn’t founded until 1933, when he joined forces with Leon Packard.

The company continued to make consumer electronics through to the late 1960s, when it was sold to Teledyne, who continued to use the brand until the trademark was sold to the newly formed Packard Bell PC company in the mid-1980s.

Packard Bell was one of the big names of the PC business that blossomed with the advent of Windows 95. It was the biggest PC vendor in the U.S. at one point, but the company ran into financial difficulties in the late 1990s and was eventually merged into NEC, with the Packard Bell name remaining only in Europe.

Acer eventually took control of the brand in 2008, but the Packard Bell name gradually faded out of existence until now.