The simple and boring answer is probably market demand. While most home stereo systems went into the living room, customers probably just didn't want to take the additional cost when it came to an office machine that wouldn't be on display to guests anyways.

There were some efforts, but guess they were too expensive and didn't sell very well.

As a fun sidenote, when the first iMac was released, it became a just as common prop as fruit bowls and lit candles in real estate agent's object pictures, at least here in Sweden. Suddenly the home computer became something you didn't have to hide away anymore 😀

I think, as PCs emerged into the home market the design was kind of set by the years that PCs were being established in offices. There were a few cosmetic changes in the 90's and especially into the 2000's and the apparently cool iMac changed things

comparison with stereo system seems unfair though, there have been decades of home audio equipment and part of the appeal was always the appearance as they take up prominent spaces in living rooms

i really like the 80's 90's LED displays whether backlit or like the pic, green, white, reds and so on - great stuff 😀

computers and consoles have kind of caught up now, with show led clear PC cases being trendy and PS4 and 5 looking fairly sleek and inline with 'modern' things

Aui wrote on 2024-06-27, 09:34:

c5296b86-8335-49c4-9167-c523de3779cc.jpg

And here I wondered, the sophistication in design (and execution) was always orders of magnitude higher than the typical PC cases. With your average PC case, you would cut your fingers on grated metal edges, cheap plastics, strange design solutions

Have you ever looked into insides of one of those fancy eighties stereos? 😀 As to outside aesthetics, mass market didnt demand anything fancy, and those who tried got burned (Gateway 2000 Destination etc).

Originally, the PC was just a work tool.
It was obvious for it to be as "crude" as a hammer, a saw, a lathe...

Aui wrote on 2024-06-27, 09:34:

design language

And what's that even supposed to mean? 🤣
Obviously some recent marketroid newspeak...
I'm 100% sure that when the PC was originally designed, that term didn't even exist... and for me, it still doesn't exist 🤣

Grzyb wrote on 2024-06-27, 11:57:

Originally, the PC was just a work tool.
It was obvious for it to be as "crude" as a hammer, a saw, a lathe...

.. as an electronic typewriter [..]

Aui wrote on 2024-06-27, 09:34:

design language

Industrial design. 🙂👍

Edit: There was a crossover between PCs and music equipment at one point.
Both servers and MIDI equipment support 19" rack format.
Same goes for radio equipment (CB radio, amateur radio, linear amplifiers; PAs ). Grundig CBH 2000 comes to mind.

Aui wrote on 2024-06-27, 09:34:

So why did this classic home stereo design language never really worked with PC's ?

Profitability.

Started beige, they sold, market standards set.

If a company wants to make their product stand out, they do it with branding and marketing: that's cheaper than complex hardware and staff to assemble it.

And computers are not an appliance like a stereo, they are universal machines. As long as you can get the real world in and out of a computer, it can do anything. All those knobs on that Sony can be replicated in the computer. There is no need for loads of external controls.

But that pragmatic point aside, profit is still a big factor. PCs can be so much "cheaper" (some kind of ratio of manufacture to sale price) than stereos, and so the PC low end especially can be terrible: eg razor-blade metal cases, and today plastic trim that cannot really ever be worked with, as it'll break if looked at funny.

Whenever I think of of stereo equipment and computer systems in the same thought, my mind always drifts towards the Commodore CDTV.

Nah, it's the office looks. It's also a matter of prestige and being taken seriously.

IBM PCs looked like an evolution of an electric typewriter. It looked worthy, massive, professional.

Back then, the business people didn't want business equipment to look "cool".
They wanted it to blend in, to look like a solid workhorse.

That attitude was not only limited to office people, by the way.
Engineers and lab personnel didn't want "toys", but massive measuring equipment.

A spectrum analyzer, logic analyzer or scope had to be clunky, heavy and beige. Not painted in glossy piano black.

As technology progressed, this went so far that modern models got lead weights installed, so the modern equipment wouldn't feel "cheap".

Anyway, there are always exceptions.
The Japanese were very open to hi-fi design.
Just look at the FM Towns, Sharp X68000 or the various MSX computers.
Especially the MSX computers (Sony Hitbit etc) had been available in a VCR style.

Here in western hemisphere, the Sanyo MBC-550 or 555 had been available in a similar hi-fi chassis.

Edit: I forgot something. The TV set-top boxes had been available in hi-fi style, too.

My Surfstation JNT from the 90s has a Cyrix MediaGX and can run DOS, if an IDE hard disk is being installed.

Edit: Or here, the Blaupunkt Btx-Decoder DC 36 from the 1980s.

Source: Wikimedia

Look to Japanese computers, especially MSX standard.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-06-27, 12:30:

As technology progressed, this went so far that modern models got lead weights installed, so the modern equipment wouldn't feel "cheap".

Up to the late 90's, standards changed quickly and the inexpensive flexibility of the PC gave it an advantage. Need to join a network? Add a card. Need a faster modem? Add a card. Want the latest optical storage device? No problem. Larger hard drive? 3d graphics? Same thing. Faster CPU? Why your ugly generic case lets you swap motherboards even! People got the functionality they wanted, and the modularity let PC users could do it for less money than mac or amiga users. And there were open standards & an economy of scale, so it wasn't just cheaper, it was much cheaper. And everything was happening on the PC first because that's where the market was and there weren't annoying licensing issues or walled gardens to restrict entry. So it was cheaper and faster.

The "much cheaper commodity" aspect of PC's lead to a lot of cheap parts that wouldn't have seen the light of day if the overall system costs were higher. Some small fraction of that extra cost would have gone for higher quality case materials & design.

By the 2000-2005 period, PCs cases should have started contracting as the need for random expandability started going down. By that point, Moore's law had absorbed the storage controller, IO controller, network and audio into the motherboard for the vast majority of users and integrated serviceable HD video was well on its way. And what wasn't absorbed by the motherboard could be handled by USB most of the time.

But curiously it didn't happen as quickly as it could have though. Some of that was inertia. People were used to the big bulky cases. But a lot of that was Mhz race made small cases less desirable. Hot CPU's needed air flow and big hulking heat sinks. No need to add weights if you had a 300g P4 heatsink in there! But the Mhz race wasn't just between Intel and AMD. The Mhz race caused the PC to leave other computers in the dust from a performance stand point. Your average 2002 PC was so much faster than any other home computer that it was silly and that's why XP was able to get a 90% market share. It could do things that other computers couldn't.

Eventually people started to make fun of the "John Hodgman" PCs and the "Patrick Warburton" PCs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_a_Mac .

By the time we got to 2010, I think small form factor desktops and laptops had taken over everything except for the gamers, who still needed to swap their high wattage GPUs on a regular basis. Come to think of it, I haven't had a desktop computer at work since 2006. Hard to make people work remotely without laptops! The that was the killing blow for the desktop workstation. Work from home!

The original 5150 has a nice design motif with the recessed front section and curved edges on the front faceplate.

This whole question strikes me as a bit odd though since you seem to be asking why pcs weren't like hifi stacks , when obviously pc's design language would revolve around making the computer more practical to computer users and not people into hifi, they are two completely different markets.

.. I'm so glad that servers and 19" racks still exist. ^^

Overall situation of modern PC chassis is like with the DIN slots for car radios on European cars, I think.

Some models still have them, but the majority have an integrated entertainment system now and thus lost the slot.

Downside of this is the loss of expandibility.
A DIN slot couldn't just house a car radio, but also a CB radio/amateur radio.

Anyway, the majority of people, the norms, don't miss expandibility.

I guess it's the same sort of people who "consume" films and music online,
instead of having a small physical library that they maintain with love and care.

My sister is like this, for example, I think.
She's fine with a device that stays within its original limitations.
She also rarely watchs same film multiple times, so she has little interest in a physical copy.

That's sad for me, because I can't really give her CDs or DVDs or BDs as a present (birthday, Christmas). The media simply catches dust in her living room.

Edit: This was meant as a response to what douglar wrote, it just came to mind. 😅

Um, what I liked most about the PC ecosystem was the flexibility and future proof nature.

A 20th century PC was a lot like an original Jeep, I think.

It wasn't very pretty or stylish, but it was reliable and something you could depend on.

It wasn't very sophisticated or elegant, maybe, but it could be fixed with a set of tools. Not unlike an old Jeep.

Even back then, some cases were out of step with the usual tedious trend - for example Vobis Highscreen brand, designed by Lutz (Luigi) Colani.
https://dusty-voodoo.com/Retro-Computer/Vobis … lani-386-DX-40/
https://muzeumpc.pl/eksponat/highscreen-colan … dx-50-dos-win3/

The Colani design. Oh my, it was either being loved or hated. There was no in-between. 🥲

Also from Germany were the Schneider Tower AT, Euro AT and the home computter Schneider Euro PC.
The Tower AT was quite stylish like Colani, but not everyone liked it.

Then there were the black ESCOM PCs. ESCOM was a big PC store (like Vobis and its brands Highscreen/Peacock),
but most international users likely merely vaguely remember it as the villain that ruined the Amiga legacy.

In France, the Goupil PCs were quite modern looking. Goupil G40, Goupil Golf etc.
They also were available in black painted chassis.

Ydee wrote on 2024-06-27, 15:37:

Lutz (Luigi) Colani

So, his real name was Lutz and he was German!?
For all those years, decades, and even centuries, I thought he was Italian... (insert facepalm here)

Anyway, his designs were among my worst nightmares...
For all those crimes against German Square Functionality(TM), Germany should have stripped him of citizenship, and expelled 🤣

There certainly were PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s with cases with different appearances.
Most of the big PC makers had different looking cases made for them. Compaq, Gateway 2000, and Packard Bell come to mind. However most of those used proprietary layouts, and wouldn't accept standard AT or ATX motherboards.
Most small PC makers just assembled from off the shelf parts, and this is where you would see the stereotypical beige box.

Then there were expensive workstations from NeXT, Silicon Graphics, or Sun Microsystems. Since budget wasn't a concern, many systems from these companies had very distinctive case designs and colors.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-06-27, 16:40:

So, his real name was Lutz and he was German!? For all those years, decades, and even centuries, I thought he was Italian... (in […]
Show full quote

Ydee wrote on 2024-06-27, 15:37:

Lutz (Luigi) Colani

So, his real name was Lutz and he was German!?
For all those years, decades, and even centuries, I thought he was Italian... (insert facepalm here)

Anyway, his designs were among my worst nightmares...
For all those crimes against German Square Functionality(TM), Germany should have stripped him of citizenship, and expelled 🤣

Colani transcended mere nationalism. Yes, born in Berlin, but his father was Swiss of Kurdish descent and his mother Polish. Given Switzerland speaks both German and Italian (and French and Rhaeto-Romansch), using the Italian version of his first name is valid enough. Pretty par for the course for Kreuzberg actually 😉