I can’t recommend The Silicon Underground blog highly enough if you’re interested in retrocomputers. Dave Farquhar writes well-researched articles on all manner of topics; I find myself learning something new even for hardware and software I previously though I understood.
Yesterday’s post concerns the groundbreaking Compaq Portable, the company’s first computer:
[A]nnounced 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.
And speaking of things I didn’t know:
The name “Compaq” allegedly …
I can’t recommend The Silicon Underground blog highly enough if you’re interested in retrocomputers. Dave Farquhar writes well-researched articles on all manner of topics; I find myself learning something new even for hardware and software I previously though I understood.
Yesterday’s post concerns the groundbreaking Compaq Portable, the company’s first computer:
[A]nnounced 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.
And speaking of things I didn’t know:
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. In time, Compaq also made desktop computers, but even in the 1990s when I was selling them at retail, I had to remind people of that. I remember people thinking Compaq only made portables.
I love the styling on my Presario 5060, but there’s no question Compaq’s heyday was during the 1980s and early 1990s. Those Deskpro 386 machines were also super interesting, both for their industrial design and what they represented. One of these days…!