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Compaq Compatible

The Compaq Portable was the first product in the Compaq portable series to be brought out by Compaq Computer Corporation. It was the first "100%" IBM PC compatible personal computer not manufactured by IBM, and also the first IBM PC compatible portable computer. more...

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Compaq derived their company name from the compact nature of the Portable.

Announced in November 1982 and released in March 1983 at a price of US$3,590, this "luggable" suitcase-sized computer was one of the progenitors of the modern laptop; an honor it shares with the CP/M-based Osborne 1 and the MS-DOS-based (but not entirely IBM PC compatible) Hyperion. Its design was influenced by that of the Xerox NoteTaker, a prototype computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1976.

The 28 lb (12.5 kg) of computer that made up the Compaq Portable folded up into a luggable case the size of a portable sewing machine. Compaq sold 53,000 units in the first year and set revenue records for American businesses in its first three years of operation.

The Compaq Portable had basically the same hardware as an IBM PC, transplanted into a luggable case, with Compaq's custom BIOS instead of IBM's. The system came with 128 kilobytes of memory (expandable to 640K), two 5.25" floppy disk drives, a built-in 9" green screen monitor and a unique CGA-compatible video card. The Compaq's video card extended IBM's CGA by using 9x14 pixel character cells to generate text, rather than the usual 8x8 pixel character cells. This was made possible through the use of a display that could switch between 200 or 350 scan lines. While this was more expensive than IBM's design, it allowed Compaq to combine the graphics capability of the IBM CGA with the clearer text of the IBM MDA, thereby making the Compaq Portable very well suited for the spreadsheet software driving computer sales at the time. With a larger external monitor, this graphics hardware was also used in the original Compaq Deskpro desktop computer.

Compaq's efforts were possible because IBM had used mostly "off the shelf" parts for their PC, and because Microsoft had kept the right to license MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers. The only part which had to be copied was the BIOS, which Compaq did legally by reverse engineering it at a cost of $1 million. Although numerous other companies soon followed its lead into the market for PC compatibles, few matched Compaq's remarkable achievement of essentially-complete software compatibility with the IBM PC (typically reaching "95% compatibility" at best) until Phoenix Technologies and others began selling similarly reverse-engineered BIOSs on the open market.

This machine was the first of a series of Compaq Portable machines including the Portable Plus, Portable 286, Portable II, Portable III, and Portable 386.