Remembering COMPAQ

_posts/2016-02-24-remembering-compaq.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Remembering COMPAQ
+date: 2016-02-24 14:00:00
+permalink: /blog/2016/02/24/
+---
+
+IBM is obviously the company everyone thinks of first when we talk about the IBM PC -- after all, IBM is right
+there in the name.  And they designed the thing.  So IBM deserves lots of credit, especially the folks who worked
+in Boca Raton at IBM's Entry Systems Division in the early 1980's.
+
+However, IBM was a huge company that existed *before* the IBM PC and which still exists today; they had some built-in
+advantages.  The PC era also saw a lot of companies spring up from nowhere and then disappear just as quickly.
+Some of them didn't do anything particularly innovative or noteworthy -- they probably just wanted to ride the PC wave
+and make some easy money in the process.
+
+I think one of the more exceptional companies from that era is COMPAQ.  It's easy to dismiss COMPAQ as just another
+"copy-cat" operation, but I think it's a mistake to dismiss any company in the PC business as simply "copying" or
+"cloning" the IBM design.  Companies like COMPAQ were really in the *compatibility* business.
+
+Innovation in the PC industry would not have been as rapid and diverse if IBM had been the only supplier of
+compatible machines and accessories.  And IBM probably would have continued some of the monopolistic practices it had
+perfected in the mainframe era, like exclusive service contracts.  That might have been a win for IBM, but it almost
+certainly would *not* have been a win for customers.
+
+In 1982, the founders of COMPAQ took a big gamble, by reportedly investing around a million dollars to create
+system software (ROM BIOS) that mimicked IBM's without infringing on it.  I don't know if COMPAQ pioneered the concept
+of "clean room" design, where the engineers designing and coding have no direct contact with the hardware and software
+they're cloning, but they were certainly successful.
+
+But that wasn't COMPAQ's most important contribution.  That was just the price they had to "pay to play."  Armed with
+compatible hardware and software, COMPAQ proceeded to innovate in ways that IBM did not.
+
+Look at COMPAQ's first product: the COMPAQ Portable.  For starters, it was *portable*.  And unlike
+IBM machines, it didn't force you to choose between a higher-quality text-only (MDA) display or a lower-quality
+graphics-capable (CGA) display.  COMPAQ improved on IBM's mutually-exclusive display choices by creating a monochrome
+display that could display both high-quality text *and* graphics.
+
+IBM released their own portable unit a year later, but it looked suspciously COMPAQ-like, and it lacked COMPAQ's
+innovative display.
+
+That tradition of innovation at COMPAQ continued for many years.  Sometimes they even seemed *more* concerned about
+compatibility than IBM did.  For example, faster machines sometimes broke speed-sensitive floppy-based copy protection
+schemes, which COMPAQ tried to avoid by automatically *slowing* the machine down whenever a floppy drive was spinning.
+
+To my knowledge, IBM never bothered with such a feature -- maybe IBM was simply being pragmatic, or perhaps they were
+just a little arrogant, operating on the theory that if the universe revolves around IBM, then the planets will
+simply realign *themselves* (translation: software vendors will release new versions if they want to remain IBM-compatible).
+
+Sadly, COMPAQ was ultimately absorbed by another behemoth -- Hewlett Packard -- and then simply disappeared.  Today,
+all we have are the memories.
+
+### Speaking of Memories
+
+In particular, Read-Only Memories: we have precious few of those, too.  I finally obtained
+a [ROM Dump](/devices/pc/rom/compaq/bios/portable/) from COMPAQ's first machine, the COMPAQ Portable, but I had to buy
+a system board on eBay to get it.  Considering all the effort (and money) that COMPAQ invested in writing that code,
+you would think those things would be memorialized a bit better.
+
+Looking ahead to the day when PCjs will be able to simulate the original COMPAQ Portable, I thought it would be a good
+idea to create my own roughly chronological list of [COMPAQ Machines](/devices/pc/machine/compaq/) from the 1980s,
+since they are all machines I would like to see PCjs eventually support:
+
+ + COMPAQ Portable
+ + COMPAQ [Portable] Plus
+ + COMPAQ DeskPro
+ + COMPAQ DeskPro 286
+ + COMPAQ Portable 286
+ + COMPAQ Portable II
+ + [COMPAQ DeskPro 386](/devices/pc/machine/compaq/deskpro386/)
+ + COMPAQ Portable III
+ + COMPAQ Portable 386
+ + COMPAQ 386/20e
+ + COMPAQ SLT Series (SLT/286)
+ + COMPAQ LTE Series (LTE 286, LTE 386)
+
+It's hard to stop at this point, because PCjs supports the 80386, and COMPAQ produced other 80386-based systems,
+like those in the "LTE Lite" series.  But I think I need to stick my original plan and draw a line at the end of the
+1980s.
+
+### Regarding The COMPAQ Name
+
+As best I can tell, COMPAQ preferred to print its company name in all-caps, so that's my practice as well.
+
+However, it seems that sometime between the release of [COMPAQ MS-DOS 3.10](/disks/pc/dos/compaq/3.10/) and
+[COMPAQ MS-DOS 3.31](/disks/pc/dos/compaq/3.31/), there may have been a shift in policy.  Both products still
+called themselves `The COMPAQ Personal Computer MS-DOS`, but in 3.31, the copyright string changed to
+`Compaq Computer Corp.`
+
+Their all-caps practice also extended to at least *some* product names (eg, the `COMPAQ DESKPRO`), but I'm not sure
+how strict they were, and I'm decidedly less so, which is why I use the name `COMPAQ DeskPro`.
+
+*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*  
+*February 24, 2016*