Compaq

When Compaq entered the computer world, it took the whole market by storm. With stiff competition from numerous well-placed companies such as Apple, IBM, Atari, and Commodore, Compaq decided to do things differently. It decided to focus on portability. This is what gave birth to the vintage Compaq portable series of computers.

Interestingly, the first Compaq computer was designed on a placemat at a restaurant named House of Pies in Houston!

All computers in the Compaq portable computer series were 1 X 1 X 2 ½ in size. The series included the following versions:

Portable: Announced in 1982 and released early the next year, Compaq portable spelled disaster for its toughest competitor, IBM (considered a monopolist at that time). Priced at $3590, it had a 4.77 MHz, Intel 8088 CPU and 128 KB of RAM; this was expandable to 640 KB. It also had a 9 inch in-built CRT monochrome monitor that worked as an effective display. For storage purposes, Compaq Portable was equipped with a dual floppy system. The imperfect aspect of it was its weight. At a whopping 28 pounds, it was certainly hard to carry around.

Portable II: This was a slightly improved version of its predecessor, Compaq Portable. Portable II was announced and released in the same year. There were four variations of it, all falling within the $3499-$4999 price range. The four systems were loaded with different values of RAM; between 256K and 640K. The two most expensive of the four had inbuilt hard drives of 10 MB and 20 MB respectively. There were no improvements in its display quality. Overall, from a technical perspective, Portable II gave users much more power than its next best competitor IBM PC/AT at approximately half the cost.

Portable III: Released after almost five years from the first Portable, users were expecting significant improvements from Portable III. One of those improvements was its weight. Portable had shed eight pounds by the time it evolved into a Portable III. With 40 MB of memory on board, it cut floppy disks out of the picture. Instead of the usual CRT display, this had a ten-inch gas plasma screen which was much better to look at.

With almost a million dollars spent on the development of BIOS for Portable alone, these computers proved promising and durable. Compaq’s vintage computers are still very much in operation even today. With minor hardware upgrades they can work much faster than they did before.

Today’s lightweight machines owe something to these “grandfathers” of the modern laptop.