98 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
98 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Remembering COMPAQ
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date: 2016-02-24 14:00:00
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permalink: /blog/2016/02/24/
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---
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IBM is obviously the company everyone thinks of first when we talk about the IBM PC -- after all, IBM is right
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there in the name. And they designed the thing. So IBM deserves lots of credit for where we are today, especially
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the folks who worked in Boca Raton at IBM's Entry Systems Division in the early 1980's.
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However, IBM was a huge company that existed *before* the IBM PC and which still exists today; they had some built-in
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advantages. The PC era also saw the rise and fall of many other personal computer companies. Some of them didn't
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do anything particularly innovative or noteworthy -- perhaps they simply wanted to ride the PC wave and make some easy
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money in the process.
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One of the more exceptional companies from that era is COMPAQ. It's easy to dismiss COMPAQ as just another
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company that merely "copied" or "cloned" the IBM design, but COMPAQ's ambitions went beyond imitation: they were
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really in the *compatibility* business.
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Innovation in the PC industry would not have been as rapid and diverse if IBM had been the only supplier of
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compatible machines and accessories. And IBM probably would have continued some of the monopolistic practices it had
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perfected in the mainframe era, like exclusive service contracts. That might have been a win for IBM, but it almost
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certainly would *not* have been a win for customers.
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In 1982, the founders of COMPAQ took a big gamble, by reportedly investing around a million dollars to create
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system software (ROM BIOS) that mimicked IBM's without infringing on it. I don't know if COMPAQ pioneered the concept
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of "clean room" design, where the engineers designing and coding have no direct contact with the hardware and software
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they're cloning, but they were certainly successful.
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But that wasn't COMPAQ's most important contribution. That was just the price they had to "pay to play." Armed with
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compatible hardware and software, COMPAQ proceeded to innovate in ways that IBM did not.
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Look at COMPAQ's first product: the COMPAQ Portable. For starters, it was *portable*. And unlike
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IBM machines, it didn't force you to choose between a higher-quality text-only (MDA) display or a lower-quality
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graphics-capable (CGA) display. COMPAQ improved on IBM's mutually-exclusive display choices by creating a monochrome
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display that could display both high-quality text *and* graphics.
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IBM released their own portable unit a year later, but it looked suspiciously COMPAQ-like, and it lacked COMPAQ's
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innovative display.
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That tradition of innovation at COMPAQ continued for many years. Sometimes they even seemed *more* concerned about
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compatibility than IBM did. For example, faster machines sometimes broke speed-sensitive floppy-based copy protection
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schemes, which COMPAQ tried to avoid by automatically *slowing* the machine down whenever a floppy drive was spinning.
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To my knowledge, IBM never bothered with such a feature -- maybe IBM was simply being pragmatic, or perhaps they were
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just a little arrogant, operating on the theory that if the universe revolves around IBM, then the planets will
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simply realign *themselves* (translation: software vendors will release new versions if they want to remain IBM-compatible).
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Sadly, COMPAQ was ultimately absorbed by another behemoth -- Hewlett Packard -- and then simply disappeared. Today,
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all we have are the memories.
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### Speaking of Memories
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In particular, Read-Only Memories: we have precious few of those, too. I finally obtained
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a [ROM Dump](/devices/pc/rom/compaq/bios/portable/) from COMPAQ's first machine, the COMPAQ Portable, but I had to buy
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a system board on eBay to get it. Considering all the effort (and money) that COMPAQ invested in writing that code,
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you would think those things would be memorialized a bit better.
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Looking ahead to the day when PCjs will be able to simulate the original COMPAQ Portable, I thought it would be a good
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idea to create my own roughly chronological list of [COMPAQ Machines](/devices/pc/machine/compaq/) from the 1980s,
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since they are all machines I would like to see PCjs eventually support:
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- COMPAQ Portable
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- COMPAQ [Portable] Plus
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- COMPAQ DeskPro
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 286
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- COMPAQ Portable 286
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- COMPAQ Portable II
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- [COMPAQ DeskPro 386](/devices/pc/machine/compaq/deskpro386/)
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- COMPAQ Portable III
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 386/20
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- COMPAQ Portable 386
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 386/25
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 386s
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 386/20e
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- COMPAQ SLT Series (SLT/286)
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- COMPAQ DeskPro 386/33
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- COMPAQ LTE Series (LTE and LTE/286)
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It's hard to stop at this point, because COMPAQ produced other innovative 80386-based systems, like those in the LTE
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and LTE Lite series. But I think I need to stick to my original plan and draw a line at the end of the 1980s.
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### Regarding The COMPAQ Name
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As best I can tell, COMPAQ preferred to print its company name in all-caps, so that's my practice as well.
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However, it seems that sometime between the release of [COMPAQ MS-DOS 3.10](/disks/pc/dos/compaq/3.10/) and
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[COMPAQ MS-DOS 3.31](/disks/pc/dos/compaq/3.31/), there may have been a shift in policy. Both products still
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called themselves `The COMPAQ Personal Computer MS-DOS`, but in 3.31, the copyright string changed to
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`Compaq Computer Corp.`
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Their all-caps practice also extended to product names (eg, `COMPAQ DESKPRO`), at least in their marketing literature.
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Contemporary news stories, however, tended to lower-case the product name (eg, `COMPAQ Deskpro`). I've decided to
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split the difference and use mixed-case where it seems appropriate (eg, `COMPAQ DeskPro`).
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*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*
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*February 24, 2016*
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