Radiohead’s third studio album, OK Computer, was released on May 21, 1997. An unquestionable classic and generationally significant work of art, OK Computer asks many deeper questions, but let’s set subtext aside for a moment and ask ourselves: what is an OK computer? Literally what is it? The answers might be right in front of us. To mark the anniversary, we’re taking a look back at some of the most OK computers of the past 25 years. 

Packard Bell Club 30 (1998)

On “Airbag,” Thom Yorke sings about being born again through a near-death experience thwarted by technology. “I am born again / In a fast German car / I’m amazed that I survived / An airbag saved my life.” Similarly, Packard Bell had experienced near-death in the mid-1990s with dismal sales and reviews, until its merger with NEC in 1996 granted a brief stay of execution. Fresh off the merger, the Packard Bell Club 30 desktop PC shipped around Christmastime 1998 and was a perfectly mediocre offering. The Club 30 included a Cyrix 300 MHz CPU (which some rightly criticized as merely emulating an Intel Pentium II while actually clocking at about 233 MHz) and 32 megabytes of RAM. More importantly, it came packaged with the brand-new, first version of Windows 98, complete with a robust smorgasbord of tolerable applications, including Encarta, Actua Soccer, and Printmaster Gold.   

eMachines eTower 333cs (1999)

“The panic / the vomit / the panic / the vomit.” Is “Paranoid Android” a prescient commentary on the cycles of anxiety-inducing inequality that perpetuate the working class? And will we ever break that cycle? eMachines may have come close to this very feat in 1999, with a decidedly middling computer called the eTower 333cs. Founded just a year earlier, eMachines released its second wave of wallet-friendly desktop PCs in April 1999, seeking to gain a foothold with its increasingly economy-savvy audience. The eTower 333cs was only $399, but it still packed a punch with a Cyrix MII 333-Mhz processor, 512 kb of level-2 cache, and a 2.1 gigabyte hard drive. While eMachines had other, more powerful offerings at the sub-$600 price point, including one with a 400-mhz Celeron processor, the 333cs was, without a doubt, the most middling.

Gateway GT5468 (2001)

The Gateway GT5468 desktop computer has a rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars on Amazon and is our OK computer for the year 2001. Gateway Computers was founded in Sioux City, Iowa and this computer shipped in a box that looked like a holstein cow. In the year 2022, Gateway is now owned by Acer and you can find versions of Acer’s EVOO laptops at Walmart that have been rebranded with the Gateway cow logo. “Hey man, slow down, slow down / Idiot, slow down, slow down” -“The Tourist.”

Archos Jukebox Multimedia 20 (2002)

Two of the prevailing themes of OK Computer are paranoia and anxiety. These moods could easily describe the portable music player industry of the early-2000s, much of which found itself reacting desperately to the smash success of Apple’s iPod in 2001. “Either way you turn / I’ll be there / Open up your skull / I’ll be there.” Yes, it was Archos who was “climbing up the walls” in 2002 when it released its last-gasp attempt at an iPod competitor in the Jukebox Multimedia 20.  Archos overloaded this poor machine with not only MP3 playing capability, but a multitude of inputs and outputs (including RCA stereo, analog-video, and analog-audio) and a 1.3-megapixel digital camera. Still, a passable LCD display and top-of-the-line storage capacity garnered harmless-to-decent reviews for this otherwise cumbersome device.

Palm Treo 650 (2004)

Palm was a juggernaut of mobile devices in the mid-2000s that operated on CDMA2000, part of the 3G family of telecommunications standards. The Treo 650 was by far the most average of them in 2004. It ran on the Palm OS, which was popular with Apple users for its ability to sync with MacOS. Palm later switched to Windows Mobile, which would definitely not come back to bite them just a couple years later.

Fujitsu LifeBook P1610 (2006)

“We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one everlasting peace” -“Exit Music (For a Film).” That’s right. The last thing you want from an OK computer is an overwhelming level of performance, but also, it has to meet some bare minimum standards. Enter the Fujitsu LifeBook P1610. It had some innovative features, capitalizing on a brief fad of swiveling monitors, but fell into an unlucky timeframe of having Windows Vista as an inbox operating system.

HP Pavilion p6500 (2010)

One of the most enduring aspects of OK Computer is the highly dissonant composition and guitar work of Johnny Greenwood, who has gone on to compose several acclaimed film scores in his signature style. A mood of pre-2000 anxiety and obtuseness pervades the entire album, and it feels just as home in the social dystopia of 2022 as it did in 1997. Anyway, the HP Pavilion p6500 is an OK computer.

Blackberry 10 (2012)

This is a close one, it veers almost too hard into a “good” computer, but I picked a Blackberry on the declining edge of the reign of Blackberries. These devices had mediocre versions of internet browsers, email, private messaging, and photo-taking capabilities. In 2012, if you were still using one of these, you were probably either a longtime professional or were otherwise forced to for some reason, much like, “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics.”

Lenovo IdeaCentre C40-30 All-in-One (2016)

“For a minute there / I lost myself,” admits Yorke on “Karma Police.” The Lenovo IdeaCentre C40-30 All-in-One has been lost to time. It is devoid of history, has no reviews on popular technology websites, and it is unclear if anyone ever actually owned one. There are purported specifications indicating that it was preloaded with either Windows 8 or Windows 10, included three USB ports in the rear and two on the side, sometimes included a NVIDIA GeForce 820A discrete graphics card, and had both touch and non-touch SKUs. These all sound like reasonably OK specifications for a computer in 2016, to the extent it was real.

Nokia 9 Pureview (2019)

In the heyday of Nokia, its phones were sleek, sexy, small, robust, and delivered on a minimum guarantee of cell coverage and ease of use. “Transport, motorways and tramlines / Starting and then stopping.” In 2019, however, mobile devices needed to meet all of these requirements as well as being fully functional, power efficient computers that plug into consumer-ready application and gaming ecosystems like those curated by Apple, Samsung, or Google. “Taking off and landing / The emptiest of feelings / Disappointed people / Clinging on to bottles.” Despite impossible market demands, we got a passable offering in 2019 with the Nokia 9 Pureview, which reviewers noted was “appropriately priced” and “comfortable to hold.” “And when it comes it’s so, so disappointing” – “Let Down.”

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