First post, by dukeofurl
- Rank
- Member
I'm a big fan of rectangular horizontal cases. Its the quintessential computer look to me to have a beige horizontal case with a crt monitor on top of it. I love booting up the superscape benchmark and seeing the computer doing misty flips. I might actually have some kind of addiction to PCs with this look 😀
I've been trying to pinpoint what might have been some of the last PCs/cases that were in this style (they need not actually fit an AT-style motherboard for purposes of this thread, really just thinking about large beige horizontal cases that you could stick a crt on). This style had its heyday in the 80s with the initial IBM PCs and the style seems to have influenced clone systems of the era well into the first half of the 90s.
Post 1995, it seemed to me this style was becoming antiquated. Towers seemed to take over as the predominant case-style, and while you still had some horizontal desktops, designers seemed to be trying to take things in a new direction with black plastic and other stylistic changes.
There were still plenty of examples of beige horizontal desktops in the pentium I and II eras. The Pentium III generation seems to be the last hurrah for cases that loosely follow the standard. There weren't many of them, and I'm kinda stretching the concept of a beige AT-style desktop for some of these, but a couple examples come to mind:
Once you get a few years later, post millennium and into the Pentium 4 era, I can find basically no examples of horizontal beige cases! But I was recently gratified to learn that the IBM Netvista (~2000-2004) could be bought in a white/beige case in the horizontal format. So at least there is one... which means it could be possible for me to have a beige horizontal desktop for the Windows XP era 😀
The netvista seems to be the last horizontal beige case design I can find that harkins back to that classic beige AT-style look. I haven't even really come across any contemporaries to this PC in the P4 era that had similar beige cases, much less ones from later eras... Certainly there have been horizontal desktop cases made since 2004, including the IBM Thinkcenter that succeeded the Netvista... but they all fit a new paradigm that seems to have lasted until the modern day, usually being low profile and black, perhaps without a full 5.25 drive bay, perhaps marketed as a tower if it could be stood on its side... something along the lines of this: 
But I'm not an expert. I'm just a guy window shopping on the net and looking at pictures, so I'm curious if anyone has some other examples of post 2000 case designs that seem to harkin back to or be reminiscent of the 80s/90s horizontal beige desktop look? And for what its worth, I'm excluding the modern Silverstone case that recently came out that was designed to look like a beige box. 
