The Compaq portable - The rise and fall of IBM

The Compaq portable is the first ever legitimate IBM compatible PC. Before the Compaq Portable IBM was the only company to legally make a PC compatible with its software, so sit back a watch the tail of how a newly formed company took on the mighty IBM and got it's portable to market and ushered in the era of the IBM compatible PC.

This video also shows me reapiring my Compaq Portable, and shows off some games in glorious green screen.

[RetroBytesUK]

Thanks to every one who helped encourage me todo this, and ZombieWorkshop for doing some of the graphics for me.

[RoseTintedSpectrum]

I never had a green screen as a kid, and even now - there's something so retro-futuristic about them. I think it was their consistent use in films like Alien and The Thing that just made me believe that everything in the future would be displayed in green.

[bladesofseven]

On today's episode of 'Things Youtube advertised and I clicked on...'

Not that I regret the click. Very slick production, reminds me of Nostalgia Nerd and Laird's Lair. You've got a sub :D

[dpeastman]

This was my first computer. Well, not mine exactly as it belonged to my dad's employer. But he would lug it home for me on weekends and I spent a lot of hours playing around. It was on that machine that I first learned to code BASIC, among many other things. This video was a fun nostalgia trip.

[RetroBytesUK]

My first PC was a 386DX with a whole 4Mb of RAM, which was a good spec when it was made, unfortunately by the time I had it the min spec for most games was a 486SX 25mhz.

[MagnusVojbacke]

Probably my favorite compaq video on the youtubes :) Thanks for making great videos!

[Hollaendaren]

Great stuff! You've got another sub :)
What's that version of Tetris called? That's the one I played as a kid and I haven't been able to find it yet.

[JapanPop]

My first PC was a clone from Jameco in the coolest flip-top case. 1988. It has CGA graphics and a Panasonic dot matrix printer. We were running the NEC VC20 10 mhz chip. 20 mb MFM. We played Stonedale and text based adventures, but I twisted my dad’s arm to get us a VGA monitor and board—and eventually a Harris 286-16 motherboard with a whopping 4mb ram. Then we could play games, even run windows 3.1. That was key for my midi adventures. Miss those days.

[tonycrabtree]

Compatibility and Quality. What a time it was to be alive and still be alive. We’ve experienced telephony innovation and computer innovation. Moore’s law in full effect.

[andrezunido]

My first house owned PC was a Pentium 166 MHz with 16mb of RAM and a 2 MB cirrus logic video card. Quite the multimedia machine at the time. Played a lot on cool games on this machine.

[drachenfels]

Only recently algorithms suggested I should see your videos, they are impressive as hell. Well done!

[shadowinthevoid]

Great video. Enjoyed the mix of general information and information about the specific machine.
I miss DOS PCs

[marksterling]

This takes me back I got my first pc in my last year of a levels just before university. I worked the school holidays setting up a bunch of pcs for word processing, they were Hyundai 10mhz 8088 with Hercules graphics and 20mb hdds. After setting up 6 of them and training the staff to use them, I had earned enough to buy my own but with a 40mb hdd and cga graphics on a Philips 8833 monitor. After having the pc 3months I worked out that the graphics card was ega compatible (change a number of jumpers) and the Phillip monitor would support ega. Massive results

[SteveSallyandSmokey]

I remember walking into a business computer shop to buy a pack of 5.25" floppies, probably for my C64 (before upgrading to an Amstrad PC512). Sales man saw me oggling the demo running on a Compaq, so got me to hold the keyboard while he lifted the running machine in the air and dropped it a couple of feet onto the desk, where it just rebooted and ran the demo again. I was very impressed at the time

[SirRigbyBaconKaiser]

My first PC was either IBM PC and/or a Compaq deskpro, but I definitely remember that distinction magenta CGA pallet. Especially for Accolades F1 Grand Prix.
Saying that I do remember CGA having different pallets and I think some games used them. Then again this is some 30 odd years ago.

[kruador]

Our family's first PC was an ICL DRS M30. AMD 286 at 12 or 16 MHz (can't remember which), VGA graphics, 2 MB RAM, 100 MB hard disk. I recall it was MS-DOS 3.3 because that hard disk was partitioned into 3 x 32 MB, the max that DOS 3.3 allowed, plus one small one for the tiny bit of space remaining. It came with Windows 3.0 so must have been summer 1990.

Looking it up, it was apparently a rebadged Acer, or maybe Acer built them under contract. It's an obscure machine to have: I think my Dad must have got it on a staff discount, because he'd worked for ICL for about 20 years at that point. But it was a pretty big step up from the ZX Spectrum 48K we had previously!

[AmartharDrakestone]

Loved the video, but I've spotted one tiny inaccuracy. You've said that developers had no choice in terms of colors using CGA, but that is not really true. CGA had 6 color palettes to choose from. Though all of them looked like crap without the composite color blending thing.

[vwestlife]

The Compaq was not "the first ever IBM compatible PC". It was the first _legal_ IBM compatible PC to sell in large numbers. There were numerous PC clones before the Compaq, but most of them got in trouble for illegally copying IBM's ROM BIOS code.

[JamesHalfHorse]

I had one of those and gave it to my sister to dial into BBS. It had a 20mv connor hardcard in it for storage.

[MostlyHarmless]

In 1989 I was in college and taking a Pascal programming class. I didn't have my own PC, but a coworker's husband loaned me his Heathkit portable PC that was a clone of the Compaq portable. Dual floppies, 4.77 Mhz. Saved me a lot of time by not having to go to the campus and use the lab.