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First Aldi PC comes to the museum
Aldi’s PCs were a real sales hit from the mid-1990s. Sometimes it was fought for them – in one case even with a pistol.
In Germany, the land of bargain hunters, the Aldi PC became a real phenomenon almost 30 years ago. From 1995, customers often stood in front of the discounter doors for hours on certain campaign days to get an affordable computer. Now the Aldi PC comes in one of the most visited museums in Germany.
The House of History of the Federal Republic in Bonn points to a tower PC with a floppy and CD-ROM drive from Aldi from 1997, which the museum had already received from a private founder from Cologne in 2009. With this computer, a first part of a new permanent exhibition is opened, which is reminiscent of this significant detail of technology history in Germany.
Start in November 1995
The supermarket chain for the first time in November 1995 had an IBM-compatible computer in its range. Success was initially limited. The hardware of the PC was comparatively powerful. However, the computer was delivered with the Windows 3.11 operating system that was already outdated at the time. The new Windows 95 would have been more attractive, which Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had presented three months earlier.
The Aldi PC experienced its big breakthrough two years later. In the computer of Medion there was a Pentium 166 chip from Intel. The number 166 stood for the clock frequency in Megahertz with which the processor was operated. The PC and a 15-inch monitor cost almost 1,800 D-marks in the package (around 920 euros). Today’s processors are a few thousand times faster than the Pentium-166.
PCs at Aldi: bargain fight with a shock pistol
The bargain race sometimes got out of control. In November 1997, two men fought their fists around the last PC box on the shelf in Constance. A 36-year-old customer suffered a laceration on the head. However, the injured person did not give up and forced the PC to be published with a shotgun. However, he was not allowed to take the PC home with him, because the police, which has now been called up at the cash register, temporarily arrested him.
As a rule, the bargain hunt was less palpable. In the following years, Aldi and the house supplier Medion were regularly able to stop tens of thousands of PCs. And the competition from Lidl, Norma and other discounters also had personal computers between vegetables, toilet paper and H-milk.
Computer dealer on the defensive
The victims of this discounter offensive were traditional computer retailers such as Schadt Computertechnik. The Stuttgart -based company tried for a while to counter the offers of Aldi and Co. with its own creative actions and at times offered gummy bears, shower cream and chocolate significantly under purchase price. In the advertising campaign it said: “Computer you buy from the specialist dealer, not from the greengrocer”. However, the discounters had the longer breath. In 1998 the bankruptcy proceedings against Schadt opened.
A kind of “Volks-PC”
The House of History is now exhibiting the Aldi PC in its contemporary historical collection, in which the striking changes in everyday life are documented with original objects. “Thanks to the relatively low price and competitive equipment, the Aldi-PC developed into a kind of” Volks-PC “, because it enabled almost all social classes to start the information and Internet age,” said a spokeswoman for the museum.
Source: Stern
