The first Compaq computer was its eponymous Compaq Portable, announced November 4, 1982. It was a suitcase-sized clone of the original IBM Personal Computer, with an Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 MHz running Microsoft MS-DOS. It was hardly the first non-IBM computer to run MS-DOS, but it was the first legal IBM PC clone with a high degree of compatibility.
Compaq shipped the first unit about four months later, in March 1983. It originally cost $2995 for a single-drive unit. A dual-drive unit, which was much more useful, cost $3,590.
The first Compaq Computer
Rod Canion and two of his colleagues from Texas Instruments wanted to start a company, but they needed a product first. Canion had purchased an IBM PC to help him start the company. One morning in January 1982 he was sitting in his office thinking, when he glanced at his IBM PC and thought it would be nice if it was portable.
He took the idea to his colleagues and they came up with some requirements. Mainly, they wanted portability, 100% IBM PC compatibility, and they didn’t want it to look like the Osborne, which Canion described as looking like “military surplus.”
They met with an industrial designer, who sketched something to their specifications. They quickly secured financial backing, and started hiring engineers. The Compaq Portable went from concept to a product you could buy in about 10 months.
The Compaq Portable wasn’t very portable by today’s standards. It was the size of a suitcase and it weighed 28 pounds. But you could pack up and move it a lot faster than you could pack up and move an IBM PC and its full-size monitor. In the days before laptops and LCD screens, the Compaq Portable was as portable as you could get.
Portable suitcase-sized computers existed before Compaq, but Compaq was the first to make a suitcase-sized computer that was compatible with the IBM PC.
What “Compaq” meant
The name “Compaq” allegedly meant Compatibility and quality. It also resembled the word “compact” but may or may not have been a play on that word. It wasn’t long before Compaq introduced desktop computers as well. But even in the 1990s, when I was selling them at retail, I had customers express surprise when I showed them Compaq desktop PCs. The perception that Compaq only built portables wasn’t easy to shake.
Compaq’s Deskpro 386, announced in September 1986, was the beginning of the end of IBM’s leadership in the PC market. From 1986 onward the industry followed Compaq, not IBM.
When it came to quality, Compaq meant it. In the early 1990s, I worked on a lot of Compaq Portables. Note I said worked on. I never had to fix one. I would install upgrades in them to make them useful past their point of obsolescence. By the time I was working on them, they were well over 10 years old. Y2K did them in more than anything, because it provided a convenient excuse to replace the old beasts with something newer.
Compaq’s strategy and philosophy
IBM built the IBM PC with off-the-shelf chips and other parts, so Compaq could just buy the same chips. Compaq could license MS-DOS from Microsoft. The only thing Compaq couldn’t buy was IBM’s BIOS, a ROM chip that many programs relied on. Compaq had to clone the BIOS. To do this, they treated the BIOS as a black box, entering every possible value, observing the output, and writing code that behaved identically. Programmers who had seen IBM’s BIOS code couldn’t work on Compaq’s BIOS.
Compaq cofounder Rod Canion’s 2013 memoir Open recounts that compatibility wasn’t quite that easy. Compaq had to do some work to close some compatibility issues between MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS. He recounted Compaq engineers buying every software package they could find and testing for compatibility. But Compaq’s efforts paid off. Compaq products had a higher degree of compatibility with IBM software and peripherals than subsequent IBM products did.
The Compaq Portable sold a relatively modest 53,000 units in 1983. But more importantly, it was profitable. It took nearly 4 1/2 years for Compaq to sell 1 million computers, but the company set industry records for profits in each of its first three years. Profits matter a bit more than sales, as Commodore can attest. By 1986, Compaq was becoming an industry leader and Osborne was in liquidation. Compaq was wrong about that bet that an IBM-compatible portable would be as popular as a CP/M portable. It was more popular.
Compaq thrived through the early 1990s, but stumbled late in the decade with its acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation. Ultimately this acquisition made Compaq vulnerable as well, leading to it becoming an acquisition target itself. Today, the once mighty upstart that took on IBM and became the darling of the industry is little more than a memory.
Later Compaqs elicit mixed feelings from hobbyists today, but hobbyists put up with the quirks of the early Compaq models. Partly that’s because of their historical significance, and partly it’s because in the early days, almost every brand-name XT clone had some quirks.
The first season of the TV series Halt and Catch Fire was inspired by Compaq’s origin story. It takes a fair number of liberties but the story is recognizable.
Upgrading a Compaq Portable
If you have a Compaq Portable and want to soup it up a little, there are a couple of completely reversible mods involving the NEC V20 CPU that you can do that will nearly double its speed. Additionally, modern disk controllers like the XT-IDE will work in it, as will devices like PicoMEM. PicoMEM is especially interesting since it will add modern mass storage and wifi to the Compaq Portable. Using modern mass storage allows you to leave two full-height floppy drives in place if your Compaq Portable has them. No need to scrounge up increasingly scarce and expensive half-height 360K drives. And having wifi on your Compaq Portable seems appropriate on the ancestor to your laptop, which also sports wifi.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
how great was Compaq Portable 3? 286 and plasma red screen and 40mb and the advertising for and picture 10 pages were cool