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| post | Remembering COMPAQ | 2016-02-24 14:00:00 | /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 suspiciously 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 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 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
- 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 to 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 and
COMPAQ MS-DOS 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
February 24, 2016