The Tragedy of Compaq

[@danielpittman889]

I worked at the Compaq factory in Houston in 1996. I recall having supply chain issues that would stop production. Many nights we would arrive at our PC assembly line, only to hear rumors that there were no hard drives, fans, or power supplies. We would be given the option of going home early, or working in a different building that used cell-build stations rather than a traditional assembly line. I hated cell-building their laptops or all-in-ones, so I usually just went home. One thing that stood out was that when we had parts, the line would build computers so fast that they would stack up at the end of the line. We were building them faster than QC could check them. All the plant managers were always in meetings, and the workers (mostly temps) never knew if the shift would be twelve hours or two. The one cool thing about that job that kept me there for a while was the shift itself. Twelve hours, from 6pm to 6am, three days a week for three weeks, and four days on week four. Four-day weekends are nice. I should have found a second job, but I was lazy. Overall, a good company to work for. My best friend at the time stayed on through the merger and still works for HP.

[@awarepenguin3376]

compaq was one of my first machines, bought from compUSA. thanks for putting them together !

[@deanjustdean7818]

Sounds like a pretty typical day at any computer assembly plant or store in the 1990s to me. Some retailers that sold generics had all the parts together except the graphics card ordered by the customer and ended up gnashing their teeth and listening to suppliers make excuses. Good times.

[@hfontanez98]

Around that time, my former Engineering Manager moved from PR to Houston to become the Engineer Manager there. Any chance you know who I am talking about? Before he moved with his family to Houston, I was given the assignment to research neighborhoods and school districts in the area to help him choose where to move.

[@unknownbrony93]

My family's main computer was a Compaq Presario and I typed this comment on the now 20 year old keyboard it came with.

[@thejnelson88]

Not me thinking of a 1980s keyboard and then realizing ohhh 😲

[@VidyabhushanUpadhye]

Same here my first PC ... late 1990s.

[@bibasik7]

I still have a Compaq keyboard and mouse. They still work (with a PS/2 to USB adapter), and even the volume buttons are functional!

[@farhanrejwan]

had my dad not sold his old PCs (which were our first PCs from back in 1997 and 2005) and the keyboard along with it, I'd still have a 20+ years old white keyboard that came with it (assuming it was still working).

[@farhanrejwan]

@@thejnelson88 yeah, our childhoods are 20 years old now.

[@chuckbenedict7235]

Very nice summary, but you really needed to mention the Proliant line of servers, which arguably was the most valuable asset HP purchased from Compaq. It exists to this day.

[@foobarf8766]

I thought this was going to be all about the Proliant at first. Got an old gen-1 Proliant here and feels like I'm holding onto a piece of computer history.

[@3beltwesty]

Our old Prolina 575e ran here for 30 years..75 mhz pentium.. It orginally came with win 3.11. Then got updated to win 95. I updated it to win 98se for better drivers. It has only 1 pci slot and no USB. So the pci got a network card over 20 years ago. To move data off it I used a zip drive to the parallel port. The power supply was very robust and never got hung up like our eMachines ones did with weird voltage events. The compque would always be the only computer that after a cycle of power in a storm would boot up like nothing happened.. The thing used hardly any power like just 14 watts. Crazy low power. Used it to print labels and dumb stuff for many decades . The orginal image reading exe file was from Apple and ran under DOS mode.

[@c1ph3rpunk]

The Proliant 5000R’s were absolute tanks. Netware, SCO, Citrix Winframe, ran all of it on those beasts.

[@rickden8362]

It seems like the story of e-Machines should be in here somewhere.

[@gglovato]

Yeah i'm surprised ProLiant was not mentioned in this video when it was one of -if not- the best thing from Compaq

[@bobbyevans8496]

Love your work, praying for a magnum opus video essay on the China Taiwan conflict

[@coraltown1]

stay tuned, crazy shit could happen soon.

[@fraternitas5117]

@@coraltown1 buy all the gpus while you can

[@humble_integrity]

@bobbyevans8496 china is not going to invade taiwan. this would cause deaths on both sides and put china's rise to a halt. even the usa does not want a war with taiwan either, if a war broke out, they are too lazy and wimpy to finish their fights so they will either give up which we all know they will and do so they dont want to start one either. the only scenario where china will invade taiwan is if the us tries to make it an independent country. but let's be real here, with all these weapons usa produces, they want to wage a proxy war because that's what they've been doing for the last century. they're too wimpy to actually stand up and fight, even if they did they would lose. china has the technological advantage, at 25% of hte living standards. the usa has been going around forcing democracy down other countries throats, spreading propaganda and claiming that communism doesn't work. it's not that communism doesn't work (communism is irrelevant), the usa is the richest country in the world and they pick on poor countries like china. "look at all these problems, these humanitarian issues, china is a heap of trash". most of these problems will be resolved when the country becomes more prosperous. as living standards go up, the people will naturally demand more civil rights, but you cannot make a poor country rich by just employing democracy. actually democracy is pretty ineffective as a governing system because it requires highly educated individual to be engaged and it requires checks and balances making effective changes very slow. democracy has it's weaknesses and this will not help china solve it's poverty issue. the usa is a hypocrit when it comes to freedom of speech or rule of law, it breaks its own rules, and absolves itself from crimes it commits. look at the 80million native americans it wiped out this genocide puts nazi germany to shame, look at those bombing campaigns it launched in vietnam over 2x more than all of wwii. yet the usa wants to meddle in other country's businesses as if it has a superior morality??? please, give me a break!! but this is changing soon because the world is starting to see how petty the usa is, going around and slaughtering mllions of lives in vietnam, Afghanistan, cambodia, iraq, korea in the name of democracy denouncing communism is evil. when's the last time communism goes around the world invadng peoples countries and slaughtering people??? hint hint: 0. china's rise is making the usa jealous, despite the usa having the strongest economy, a complete monopoly over big tech, they are still jealous at china's growth. this is why the usa wants to meddle with taiwan, they want to keep the legacy of western colonialism. they want to provoke china and belittle them and spread propaganda so that others start hating the country. but the world is starting to understand how petty the usa is, this is why brics is forming and the movement towards de-dollarization. ps im also vegan bro

[@brendawright5899]

The computer sponsor for the winter olympics in 1988 was IBM. I was in charge of backup results for the Cross Country events. We were given 3 or 4 IBM pcs for result calculations. We hid a compaq in a closet and that is what we used to calculate results. It was just an easier machine to use.

[@douro20]

Compaq didn't want to use off-the-shelf parts because they couldn't control their quality. Any new product had to be engineered in-house; it wasn't good enough for them to just put some parts together and sell them under their name. And they were very good at it. But doing this made them slow to adapt to the market. The same thing is happening to HP- and they just happen to be the ones who bought Compaq in the end.

[@TheBigExclusive]

Your comment just brought back long buried painful memories of me trying to upgrade my Compaq desktop, but being frustrated at Compaq not accepting off the shelf parts PC parts. It's the main reason why I custom build my own computers now.

[@davidgoodnow269]

You are right. That hurt them; and, they just weren't big enough or have enough sway to either keep a competitive vertical or to do like Dell managed, and contract to have certain "bins" of parts from suppliers, with full-time on-site Dell Quality Control inspectors (One reason for high problems with specific issues in Dell's plants in mainland China is that all Q.C. personnel _must_ be Party supervisors, and _not Dell_ people. This not only means problems are harder to catch, it means they are literally _impossible for an outsider to solve._ ) I loved many things about the computers from those days, but I think IBM was about the closest to having a "standard." HP, Dell, still nightmares of proprietary parts!

[@tonycrabtree3416]

@@douro20 That’s because HP kept the Compaq engineers for the most part. Houston, Texas engineers are cheaper than Roseville or Cupertino, California engineers.

[@phat-kid]

this is why i hated both of those companies back then. i couldnt just upgrade my computer myself, so what's the point of getting a pc compatible?

[@FrustratedApe]

I remember the easter eggs on the motherboards, last Compaq ones from what I recall were the Evo D510.

[@jaymacpherson8167]

In 1984 I returned to gradual school (where one gradually learns they don’t want to go to school anymore [John Irving]). We wrote FORTRAN models that took time to run. The school had IBM 8086s which sometimes took hours to finish runs. When Compaq came out with the DeskPro 286, I bought one with the money I’d made on a high beta stock (Intel). I also bought a 287 and upgraded the RAM to the highest density available. It was so much faster than the 8086s. By the time Intel came out with the 386, I had learned about the DIY market and a relatively new electronics store, Fry’s. I went to Fry’s to buy a Micron motherboard, a Diamond video card, and a case. I moved the monitor, RAM, HD, keyboard, and mouse from the Compaq and went to work modeling in FORTRAN. I’d spent a fraction of what a Compaq 386 cost.

[@benholroyd5221]

Oh, is that what 'grad' stands for. I always thought it stood for graduate or something.

[@DriftJunkie]

​@@benholroyd5221Both indicate severance with academia 😂

[@darkbit1001]

Lol. I built my first PC in HighSchool ‘93 - i386 2mb Diamon Video (VLB), no HDD 3.5” HD Floppy. Add case, PSU and it all cane out for like $400. Add the SVGA monitor and my pc cost a staggering 650! DOS man.

[@belacickekl7579]

Do you still model in FORTRAN? That community's still going strong!

[@jaymacpherson8167]

@ Thanks for asking. I’ve a disability that has put that activity to rest.

[@tomschmidt381]

Another great trip down memory lane. I was at NEC Technologies and then DEC in the 1990s, developing laptop and desktop PCs. The Compaq's acquisition of DEC came as a shock and it was clear to me at the time there was no future in the PC biz on the east coast. I had no desire to move to Texas so took the initial severance package.

[@axelBr1]

In 1993 I joined the UK office of a division of large American company, our work required the use of DEC microVAXes and PCs, which were also DEC. I changed location in 1995, and in that office we were starting to use DELL PCs and laptops, which I used for the next 24 years with the company. I'd heard of Compaq, and I think I may have bought a PC and then laptop from them in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but didn't know their history went back to the early 1980s. Compaq buying DEC was a huge disappointment and the subsequent destruction of the DEC Alpha line, & VMS by Compaq & then HP was worse. But in the early 2000s we had begun porting our software to Windows running on DELL servers.

[@RetroCaptain]

A former coworker buddy bought a new NEC desktop system in 1994. He only used it 4 hours then shut it off and abandoned it. He's more of a farmer than techie. He gave it to me in 2015, it wouldn't link or connect with anything I had so I recycled it though I still have the KXT monitor which works and looks like new. I figured I was dumping something incredibly rare but knew nobody interested in this era of home computer.

[@dingaroo2003]

Wow, another ex-NEC here but was at South East Asia's Singapore office. I worked on porting Silicon Graphics Unix System V Release 4.2 to NEC's range of Unix workstations and servers (the line was EWS). I was there in 1994-1995.

[@jlinkels]

I was following developments in de PC market in those days. However summarizing it in a 30 minutes presentation gives a much better overview about what happened. History is best seen from a distance. Well done!

[@hankhillsnrrwurethra]

I'm an HPE engineer. You still see traces of Compaq around in HPE systems. Compaq lives on. BTW for the OGs, Proliant servers are on Gen 11 now.

[@jrocco36]

I loved Compaq PCs. I still have a Deskpro 433M. All my computers now are HP and when I see the T15 Torx screws I know that's a Compaq Thing.

[@jlongjr27]

Yeah, I read the title and thought tragedy? Yeah they still live on today in Houston! Just under a different name.

[@jlongjr27]

I do miss the Compaq outlet off West road, damn I'm getting old 😅

[@bassman5066]

Would be nice if HPE and Dell weren't overpriced for enterprise equipment. They are the most profitable but the worst value proposition for our customers. I'm a big Super Micro fan but their partner program sucks and we are lucky to get 10% over cost on them...

[@ami443]

@@bassman5066 which brands are the best for pcs then?

[@AcuteChronic]

With just 33-minutes to cover the rise and fall of Compaq, it is impossible to give Carly Fiorina the credit she deserves for destroying one company (Compaq) and nearly destroying another (Hewlett-Packard). She's a horrible excuse for a human being, as can be attested to by the 30,000 people she laid off. Her corporate finesse is exceeded only by her skills as a politician.

[@voornaam3191]

When you see your company has that kind of leaders, then why don't ALL EMPLOYEES simply find a better job? That means exit Compaq, and that lady can't do any more harm. Why do people work for companies that are strangled at the top? Leave them!

[@paul_boddie]

@@voornaam3191 You mean all employees, presumably. I hardly think the remedy is for people to readily quit what might have been a rewarding job that pays their bills, just to take a chance on some other job in the industry where the management is probably just as bad. But such a suggestion sure fits the narrative that a bit of initiative - a bit of hustle! - is all that's needed, and that it is always for the little people to step up and work around the corrupt system. Maybe the shareholders should be pushing these overpaid, value-destroying CEOs overboard instead.

[@AcuteChronic]

@@voornaam3191 Quite possibly the stupidest comment on the internet today.

[@xiphoid2011]

Laying off workers does not make a leader bad. In fact it is a necessary part of any boom and bust business cycle. Not Laying off workers that are not needed would doom the company even faster, and take all of the workers down with it. So please don't use lay off as sign of a bad leader.

[@noventay4]

​@@xiphoid2011if that's your best solution as a leader, then you suck

[@exidy-yt]

I used to sell Compaq Presarios in 1994-5 for a retailer in Canada that no longer exists. They were for the most part our slowest performing, highest priced systems. The only 'good' ones were the all-in-one boxes that had a VCR built into it. I used to sell dozens of those bad boys by running 'Beyond the Mind's Eye' on VHS tape on our demo system of it, never saying that the computer was rendering those graphics but it certainly gave the impression of a highly powerful system when it actually was a mere 486SX-33 in the era of DX2-66s and Pentium 60s. ;-) Compaq machines were always reliable as tanks and very well supported with software, I'll give them that. The Encarta encyclopedia, which was kind of Wikipedia on CD before the Internet was really a thing, was a massive system seller on it's own. Tell a potential customer to name any subject and then pull an article about it onto a screen was mindblowing in the pre-Internet age.

[@dohadeer8242]

I was selling them around that time too. Expensive, full of bloatware and underpowered. They (along with HP) definitely only sold to people with high budgets, everyone else bought offbrand.

[@exidy-yt]

@@dohadeer8242 HP and AST were by FAR the most sinful when it came to bloatware, especially AST with their gawdawful 'interface' on top of Windows 3.1 which was already an interface on top of MS DOS. The 4 and 8mb systems were criminally slow, hard-drive thrashing destroyers because of this. Then comes Windows 95.....

[@SaanMigwell]

I remember those types of store "salesman" I was one too. I usually just ran doom, that was what everyone in my town wanted a computer for in the 90's. "Does it run doom?" and "is it fast doom, or slow doom?" I set our demo model up with doom booted into episode one, and set the then novel WASD + Mouse controls. I sold every single Pentium 5 or amd 586 on the shelf in about five days. (I lived in a small town, very small, our entire stock was 15 machines, and we had to order 12 more before the initial boom settled down.) That store also had in the box software for every computer back to the Apple II. Most people in town at the time had either a 2gs, or an IBM (286,386,486 builds none of which were IBM's lol)

[@Merle1987]

Nobody tells the story of companies like this guy. He is the king.

[@bjorntorlarsson]

Yes, he's really good! How one tells a story is so important. There's alot of competition in my many full bookmark folders and subscription list. Here I know it'll be an interesting and enjoyable story.

[@DogmaticAtheist]

It's interesting to notice his views changing. I've probably watched every video, and there appears to be a progression.

[@WackoWambo]

@@DogmaticAtheistexplain plz

[@mwanafalsafa3613]

Y

[@BillAnt]

With a dash of clever and dry humor to spice it up. ;D

[@billwilson6670]

I worked as a contractor at Compaq for for about a year back in 2000-2001. I was there when the HP takeover took place. Despite the turmoil, that was one of the best jobs I ever had. Occasionally I still go back to the main campus in Tomball (just outside of Houston) and wander among the now abandoned buildings. It's kind of sad and eerie, sort of like walking through a graveyard.

[@geessaess1707]

This place is like someone’s memory of a town and the memory is fading.

[@nitinkataria9510]

I was in Dell US tech support in India. I was selected for HP Compaq too but they wanted me to be a sw developer rather. Compaq market was messed up due to HP as the innovation ended and they used Compaq to compete against cheaper brands as Acer, Gateway and e-Machines. Though today Acer and esp. Asus are doing really great. We used to get many Compaq customers during a virus or worm outbreak as Blaster and Sasser worms.

[@Toro_Da_Corsa]

The Compaq campus is abandoned ?

[@billwilson6670]

@@Toro_Da_Corsa Not completely. Lone Star College took over a couple of the buildings and I think one or two are leased out. But most remain empty.

[@Otokichi786]

As one who could only afford generic IBM clone computers, I saw Compaq as a "Rich Kid's computer." I saw them fade away and put it down to their insisting on "only Compaq/Compaq-approved parts." I didn't even notice when they bit the dust.

[@Carewolf]

I remember them as the expensive crap. Only difference from IBM, was being the off-brand expensive crap.

[@chrisss73841]

I remember how unrepairable or upgradable they were. We had Presario in the early 2000s, and when you wanted to run a program that needed more RAM or something, you'd open it up to find that it wasn't possible. Switched to more future-proof brands after that.

[@Sourpusscandy]

@@chrisss73841 that “wasn’t possible” nonsense is going on today, hard soldered memory and HDs, what a crock of ….

[@Will-m2t9l]

Compared was for "consumers" who knew nothing about pcs. Real people back then built their own pc.

[@Toro_Da_Corsa]

​@@chrisss73841That wasn't what they were designed for.

[@lohphat]

Compaq lives on in the HPE Proliant line of servers. They are bulletproof and a breeze to deploy and service.

[@peterkazmir]

I worked at HP during the aquisition and we all thought the Compaq hardware (servers, laptops, and desktops) were superior to the HP equivalents, and were happy that management mostly went with them. But everyone hated Carly, and everyone though the aquisition was stupid. Fun fact: I worked in a former Tandem building (for HP).

[@lohphat]

@peterkazmir Carly and Meg are vile human beings and deserved to be shunned.

[@richardwang9315]

@@peterkazmir How About the Apotheker era? 😅

[@hankhillsnrrwurethra]

@@peterkazmir I'm an engineer at HPE. There are old-timers around. Whenever she is mentioned, and it's more often than you might think, they shake their heads and roll their eyes.

[@peterkazmir]

@@richardwang9315 I left during Hurd.

[@snap_oversteer]

Compaq produced some great hardware in the 80s-mid 90s, shame that their legacy pretty much exists only in the names of some HP products (Elitebook - derived from Compaq LTE Elite in the 90s etc.).

[@tonycrabtree3416]

It’s the Proliant name that matters, not any of the consumer garbage,

[@Matt_The_Hugenot]

​@@tonycrabtree3416The Proliant was their first cut price model that marked the move away from quality.

[@tonycrabtree3416]

@@Matt_The_Hugenot The Proliant is the server that came after the SystemPro, which was their foray from just being a PC company. You are thinking of the Prolinea.

[@ChavJag]

Place i worked in the early 90's had compaq servers. They were solid, weighed a ton and very expensive. Excellent machines

[@careycummings9999]

When I listen to stories like these, where good companies either dont move fast enough to keep up with a changing market, or don't even see the market changing, and you have to cut 50,000 jobs just to stay afloat; it makes me sad for those 50,000 workers who thought they had a good job working "in computers". I saw all this happen in real time, so I chose to be an electrician, and not something cutting edge, like computers.

[@tomschmidt381]

Agree with your observation. My family runs an office supply business started by my grandfather in 1939. Growing up we had good years and bad years so I was not prepared for the rapid change of fortune in high tech businesses. Miss an inflection point (technical or business) and go from having the best year ever to three years later being out of business. That happened to me multiple times in my career.

[@davidbarker7030]

It might mitigate it a bit to realize that as one PC maker shed jobs, it was likely because other PC makers were doing better - and thus were hiring. Although in some cases (manufacturing) that often meant overseas.

[@wingman4717]

Good comment.

[@kevinbarry71]

Even as a teenager I remember when they debuted the Deskpro. Superior two and cheaper than the IBM offering. However, what they didn't understand was that they were in a commodity hardware business.

[@RetroTechIIfx]

Compaq lives on in HPE. HPE really should have took the Compaq name to distance itself from HPI and its horrible printers.

[@WeightedPressurePlateOfficial]

Hpi?

[@jakethesnake05]

@@WeightedPressurePlateOfficialHP inc.

[@simbaseven]

Loved the HP LaserJet Pro M40x series. Never had a problem with them.

[@joes9954]

It’s more like HP’s 2008 purchase of EDS that lives on in HPE as that’s essentially what HP spin off

[@jonfreeman9682]

Yeah but without the name it's basically dead. They only kept the Compaq name for couple years then abandoned it.

[@andrewclark1107]

My Dad got his first engineer career job in Scotland during the 90s with digital, he then started working at compaq and then retired with HP a few years ago without having to leave a single company😅

[@williamlynskey787]

Same, but in Galway, Ireland 👌

[@uss_04]

Weird when things get old enough and so far back that “Accounting for inflation” becomes more than a rounding error

[@Mandragara]

​@@gus473Trump hyperinflation let's goooo

[@bjorntorlarsson]

Complaining over high prices is a sign of getting old. No, actually now the young complain the most. Tough times for them. And btw, one still "rounds off" for inflation, by putting that round figure at the end.

[@carlosrivas1629]

government mismanagement.

[@piuthemagicman]

​@@MandragaraYou can thank Nixon & Reagan for your now only super inflation. You have extremely inflated times coming no matter who runs your country. Actually since Nixon dumped the gold standard some deep crap is way overdue.

[@robo1p]

So like, 4 years?

[@robertbrown1338]

my first laptop was a compaq, RIP.

[@gus473]

My second laptop was/is a Compaq, running Windows 95. Slow, but does what it's supposed to, mostly.

[@rjackson2090]

my first pc was a compaq!

[@jesus2621]

I remember buying a Compaq was a luxury and was considered the best

[@robertbrown1338]

@@jesus2621 mine was like 15 bucks at a thrift sale..nothing fancy at all but it ran msn messenger and that's all that mattered

[@ShaunCollege]

I worked on a bunch of Compaq’s back in the day. It was a good buy until Dell caught up. For a while, Gateway was the best bang for the buck. Lot of contenders in the beginning :)

[@alexanderoransky7601]

I remember when you could buy a Taiwan-made noname PC that ran MS-DOS and MS Windows with all spreadsheets and games of the era perfectly for under $1000 in early 90s. Was no a kit, was a complete product ship to your door.

[@lopwidth7343]

Also in the late 90s early 2000. They had all sorts of funny names. I remember big retailer having a computer lineup called My Home PC or something really generic. There were tons of no-name brands like that selling completely adequate prebuilds for the average consumer with just as high quality parts inside, like the HP or Compaqs for much less markup. And you owned it, through and through. No proprietary parts of firmwares to deal with and could swap and repair whatever you wanted unlike in todays prebuild HPs, Acers and Dells

[@stijnvandamme76]

And all the software was pre(pirated)loaded :D

[@AC-jk8wq]

18:03 the ABS shell of the CRT has UV broken down and turned brown with age… the PC and CRT used to be the same color…. 😃

[@TheManFrayBentos]

I noticed that and realised that they weren't all nicotine brown, as if they'd all been in a print room full of heavy smokers for years.

[@migsvensurfing6310]

It is the fire retardent inside the plastics (bromine) that colors the plastic yellow over time. Especially fast when in sunlight. Ironically the yellowing can be reversed again using the sun.

[@peterfmodel]

This video bring back a lot of memories and this video is excellent. It was a wild time back in the 1980's to 2010. My boss reported to Mark Hurd when i worked at Oracle. While Mark was a demanding boss, i was always impressed by him. It was a shock when he passed.

[@Jackpkmn]

I recovered a Compaq Deskpro 486/33 from my school's dumpster back in 2000. I wish I had held on to it instead of dumping it once I got my hands on a Pentium II Dell system some time later.

[@WyomingGuy82201]

Carly was THE DUMPSTER FIRE.

[@bshingledecker]

Capellas went on to ignite MCI/Worldcom.

[@crapmalls]

Came here to say this. Remember when she was going to run for president😂

[@richardwang9315]

@@WyomingGuy82201How about Apotheker too? 😅

[@LethalJizzle]

​@@crapmalls Holy shit I remember. All I heard about her was how she was disastrous at HP and now wants to have a go at running a country.

[@notaspectator]

@@crapmalls what's the big deal with that? depends on how people take accountability and learn , they can do better. exposure to failure is great

[@Choralone422]

I do love dives into former powerhouse companies such as Compaq. I started my IT career in the 90s and was able to see firsthand the end of Compaq and the relative disaster the HP merger was from the POV of a laptop & desktop warranty provider for both corps. To say that merger was an ongoing nightmare for far too long would be putting things very nicely! It took a couple of years for all of the fallout from that mess to come to an end. It was easy to see the frustration from within HP when talking to or meeting with the HP service reps and in-house techs. I'd love to see a video into IBM's PC division and more about the eventual sale of it Lenovo in May of 2005. My employer had been performing warranty repairs on IBM laptops & desktops for a number of years when that went down. I was in attendance at the IBM/Lenovo ThinkOpen conference at the Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World in May 2005 just days after the sale had been completed.

[@aloksharma4611]

Thanks!

[@netherza]

My child heart has a special hatred for compaq and that presario, when I opened that case on a p3 motherboard that had no agp slot, just a husk where it should have been

[@hedydd2]

No mention of the superb Compaq Ipaq personal digital organisers which were indispensable to my business in the early 2000’s and until the iPhone matured in around 2006 or 7. Even so the ability to access files privately while also doing business on the phone simultaneously was a massive advantage that could only be replicated using an iPad along with the iPhone.

[@VinkDaniel]

Only issue with these was ActiveSync... 🤢

[@omegapm4699]

This guy is the man. Very informative yet entertaining. Also, he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

[@piuthemagicman]

Exactly!

[@Kiddio]

It would be great if you could cover Fujitsu’s deal with Siemens for their “Fujitsu-Siemen’s” Desktop PC’s in the early 2000’s.

[@CaptainDangeax]

I have 2 HP laptops on my desktop. When I see a Fujitsu Siemens computer, I raise my eyebrow asking myself what garbage lies inside. I left a company in 2006, the board was replacing my working PC park by brand new FS Pentium IV with Sis chipset and a proprietary power supply. I told them most of them will be dead in 3 years. That's exactly what happened...

[@MarianoLu]

First I have to give you kudos for your great content and for having your Patreons front and center in your videos and for having tiers that are at the right price for us to contribute. Your research and delivery is excellent!

[@rchas1023]

Tell us the history of DEC!

[@gus473]

And how, with the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, minicomputers made MRI a practical possibility.

[@dziban303]

seconded

[@palmercolson7037]

Yes! The purchase of DEC by Compaq was a shock to me when it occurred. DEC not really getting into the PC line (I know about the DEC Rainbow) was part of its downfall. Part of it would be the history of Ken Olsen who built the company and then made fatal mistakes.

[@stevebabiak6997]

@@palmercolson7037 - DEC had developed the Alpha processor, and was working with Microsoft on NT. I suspect they wanted to ship lots of Alpha boxes running NT, but I think mostly they shipped Tru64 Unix and VMS boxes that used those Alpha processors.

[@poofygoof]

the death of DEC was a tragedy. compaq contributed to the commodification of PCs, and while their products were some of the best in the field, they were ultimately fungible. Alpha in contrast was punching well above its development team's size/weight but got sucked into the shipwreck of HP and Intel's itanic. entrenched x86 are worried about ARM, and I'm sure ARM is worried about RISC-V, but I don't think we'll get to the heterogeneity levels we had a few decades ago, which isn't a market -- it's an oligarchy.

[@foobarf8766]

Thanks this is well researched history! Canion being made to 'walk the plank' is a sad story, I think that investor didn't accurately value the engineering skill Compaq had, but Canion is vindicated by Proliant being their enduring legacy and mergers and acquisitions their end.

[@MadMarlin1964]

When it was official that Rod was whacked, there were large print outs in the windows on the 8th floor. It simply read, We love you Rod.

[@sukhoikip]

I have one of their last desktops, a 478 wilammette machine from early 2002. The CPU, main memory, GPU core, and VRAM all have date codes within 4 weeks of each other which is the tightest grouping I've seen in a desktop.

[@mariocueva8700]

I was a Compaq field technician in the early 90’s. I recall some of the Presarios had weird compatibility issues with sounds cards. For example, a clone ESS sound card would not work, but one ordered from Compaq would. On visual inspection the two cards looked almost identical.

[@Will-m2t9l]

Everything had compatibility issues with everything back then. Devices were fighting for IRQ request prioroties with each other.

[@zbynekchmela7778]

Saddest part of this story is end of Tandem and my beloved DEC. To give some credit to Compaq, they had nice servers and storage arrays in late 90s - technology that HP benefited from for more than decade.

[@BixbyConsequence]

Compaq dealing with Tandem ecosystem was like watching a pig trying to mate with a horse. At least Hp brought some sanity back.

[@brentsummers7377]

The Compaq Presario 520 with the built in CD drive & speakers & modem was loved by home users. Only three things to plug in power, keyboard, and mouse. And the modem was easy to upgrade. With the Apple LC II you needed to buy a separate and very expensive CD drive.

[@walterpleyer261]

It's a shame that the DEC Alpha architecture was one of the victims of the DEC deal. It must have been a formidable beast of a CPU.

[@garethrandall6589]

Way ahead of anything Intel produced at the time and even used in supercomputers, yet ditched by a management that wanted to focus on low-to-zero margin PC clones where the only technological advance was waiting for Intel to change the CPU socket again so people were forced to buy a new Intel chipset instead of just a new CPU. Such a shame, as you say.

[@dingaroo2003]

It was! All the workstations platforms running Unixes had great processing capabilities. We were able to work on AI/Expert Systems back then.

[@RayLabs]

Compaq came within minutes of buying Gateway. Just before it was going to be finalized Capella let slip that he planned on firing most of the Gateway team. Ted Waitt (CEO of GTW) thought that there was an understanding that GTW would run as an autonomous division. So Ted canceled it just before the joint press conference was going to be held.

[@jonfreeman9682]

If they did then both would have gone bankrupt faster. Gateway couldn't survive on its own but Compaq was bigger but cost was rising and margins shrinking with more competition and didn't have HP consulting arm to buttress their hardware business.

[@Ynhockey]

In the early 2000s I remember Compaq only as a low-end PC supplier, one you wouldn't want to buy from as a power user. Ironically that was when I was on the lookout for a new PC after my 90s IBM PC had become obsolete. The previous video and this one are the first time I hear of Compaq as a world-leading computer company.

[@tonycrabtree3416]

Ignorance on your part and probably just some dumb unfounded hatred. Compaq was the world’s largest server maker.

[@dohadeer8242]

Not necessarily ignorance. Compaqs dominance of the private market was extremely shortlived. They went from 'market leaders' (ie selling big numbers) to 'shitbrick bloatware systems nobody could give away' in significantly less than 5 years - I was selling PCs when they crashed and burned and HP didn't last much longer.

[@tonycrabtree3416]

@@dohadeer8242 More ignorance or just hatred. All the companies were selling PCs with “freeware” to help get price points, you clown. In fact, most companies were still doing that well into the 2010s. They’ve only improved in the last 5 years and that’s mostly due to none of that software adds value to the purchaser’s experience.

[@Will-m2t9l]

If you were a so-called "power user" back then you didn't even buy over the counter PCs back then...you BUILT one. ALL over the counter pcs were "low end" to power users back then... You don't seem to have been much of a power user

[@guardiane]

I never knew they were leading the way at all, interesting. Of course I've heard of Compaq, who hasn't? My wife owned a Compaq when we first got together and I'm sure my dad did too. I get nothing but nostalgic vibes when I think of them...sad to hear how they met their demise. This was a great informative video, thanks for putting it together.

[@yogibarista2818]

Services was the Jewel-in-the-Crown for DEC, and their hardware/software was essentially a way to sell services - Compaq bought them and then basically did nothing with it - HP bought Compaq and again basically did nothing with it - neither of them seem to understand what they had in their hands until it was too late.

[@TorianTammas]

This is what mergers or buying other companies usually is. They don't understand the benefits and the added value. They end up not using it or chasing under the competing corporate culture

[@hogfishmaximussailing5208]

Compaq was the company to beat in the mid 80’s. They had the best tech around for many years. I was a NetWare Engineer back in the day. I’d like to say those were the days but now we have Linux!

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

There's a reason HP trashed the netserver line and just slapped "HP" on the proliant product line. The proliant servers were tanks compared to netserver's cheap plastic parts.

[@corydorastube]

Another old CNE here. Loved Compaq kit. We used to sell and install Netware on Compaq.

[@stijnvandamme76]

I worked at a partner and ended up working briefly for Compaq then 6 years at Novell

[@knietiefimdispo2458]

Another old CNE here. I was so happy to recognize that those annoying HP NetServers disapeared and were replaced by ProLiants. Even guys at HP were glad to see them vanish ;- ) And, by the way, Fiorina was broadly hated inside HP.

[@user-qf6yt3id3w]

Compaq was a founder of the Advanced Computing Environment. The idea was to build Windows NT and SCO Unix compatible MIPS based systems that were kind of a MIPS version of the IBM PC standard. Unfortunately it failed. I do think their PC clones were fell behind the curve though. Back when I first bought a PC I bought components and so did everyone else. Compaq machines were expensive and, as a friend of mine put it, "plodders".

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Presario line was shoddy but the deskpro line was absolute top tier quality. I was a repair engineer for a contract containing 5,000 deskpros and I only ever got three calls in three years, and two of them were a failed hard drive and a single one was a failed systemboard. And all those machines were used heavily during office hours. Compaq armada (laptop) service calls, on the other hand, were extremely frequent.

[@davidgoodnow269]

Which is both true, and awkwardly funny, because Compaq got its name and market position through careful selection of components and matching, to make their 286 famous "screamers"!

[@paul_boddie]

The ACE story overlaps with a number of different players including Digital, and it would have at least been worth a mention in the context of Compaq's relationship with Intel. As briefly noted, Intel's products were at risk of being displaced by various RISC designs, and Intel's i860 was not an adequate response. ACE was in some ways a tool employed by Microsoft and its entourage, like Compaq, to pressure Intel into delivering better performance. And sure enough, once the 486 came along, and with Intel saying all the right things about future products like the Pentium, Microsoft and Compaq largely hung MIPS out to dry. There was also the curious tale of Compaq buying into Silicon Graphics and making pleasant noises about getting into the workstation business. That might have alleviated Compaq's revenue pressures, but Compaq just didn't seem to be that kind of company. And after seeing what went down with ACE and with Compaq going through that rough patch in the early 1990s, SGI had the sense to go it alone, only succumbing to the idiocy of partnering with Microsoft (on NT) and Intel (on Itanium) towards the end of the 1990s. Practically no-one partnering with those companies ever comes out on top, as acknowledged at the end of the video.

[@user-qf6yt3id3w]

@@paul_boddieWell I agree with all that. I still think it's a shame ACE didn't get any traction at all. Not even as much as Itanium.If it had it would have enabled Compaq to get into the high margin workstation business. And of course NT was originally developed on the i860 processor (codenamed N-Ten) and then moved to MIPS. Only then was it ported to x86 and then to the Alpha and PowerPC. Of course only x86 survived though Alpha was used internally the initial development of Win64 while they waited for Itanium. The port to x64 came later. And the initial AMD x64 chips used the Alpha EV6 bus. So even though MIPS and Alpha failed we did end up running NT and Unix on a 64 bit non x86 architecture. Perhaps inevitably it was a 64 bit architecture that was generated by making the minimum change you need to make to x86 to make it 64 bit. I think the reason x86 survived is the NexGen worked out you could decode x86 instructions into RISC86 uops and execute those in RISC like out of order engine. AMD bought NexGen and Intel used the same technique once it was clear it worked. Of course it might well end up that this trick is not scalable to really wide out of order machines. You can see hints of this in the way Apple Silicon makes it possible to build low power 8-10 wide out of order ARM64 processors which don't need a uop cache because they can do that decode without it. Can you do that with x86 or x64? I think that's an open question.

[@paul_boddie]

@@user-qf6yt3id3w Don't forget the AMD K5, too. It was doing the whole "RISC op" thing, noted by Mike Johnson in his book, "Superscalar Microprocessor Design", which also apparently informed Intel's Pentium Pro design. Johnson seems to have been rather influential.

[@spyderlogan4992]

At 10:20 there's the picture of the Data General Corporation 'DG One' laptop. How would I know? I worked for DG (1975-1998, #5648)) and had one that was used as a Field Service tool. Long Live Edson de Castro~!!!

[@rairaur2234]

Ayo, that's cool

[@pugster73]

IMO, the HP Compaq merger benefitted HP much more. HP made garbage x86 servers while Compaq Proliant was ahead of its time. So was its desktop business. HP adopted Compaq's server and desktop designs.

[@tonycrabtree3416]

It wasn’t a merger. HP got it all. Ruined it all.

[@musicdev]

Proliant’s still amazing to this day. When we deploy them, everything just works out of the box. No other server is like that, and some are laughably horrible (Lenovo and Cisco come to mind). But like any server, prepare to drown in the cost of support contracts

[@rampel1]

​@@musicdev yeap hpe's profits come from support and not from just selling HW

[@thavashgovender4345]

In the early 2000s, the company I was working for gave me a Compaq Armada laptop, in beige, and I remember being very impressed with the sheer build quality of the thing. At the time I was already a huge Thinkpad fan, but I rated the Compaq as the only other machine as good as the Thinkpad. I remember going for a Digital OpenVMS training course, due to a project we were working on requiring it, and the Compaq / Digital guys were very proud of the company and all that they were doing

[@gasdive]

I love the irony of 9:00. "You can charge a premium price if you build the best machines" The best machines were Alpha based. Compaq bought DEC and HP bought Compaq and one of the first things they did was kill the line. At the time I was working for Compaq at a customer site. We had to tell them that the Alpha cluster they'd just bought, that was all singing, all dancing, wasn't going to be supported anymore, and that to replace the two alpha machines they were going to need to buy 2 proliants to do file serving, 2 more for print, 2 more for exchange, 2 more for authentication 2 more for backup servers, 2 more for virtual machines and they were going to have to accept a performance hit as a result. They did that, and then the moment the support contract was expired they chucked us out of the building.

[@garethrandall6589]

Alpha was faster than anything Intel produced yet Compaq were so unwilling to value what they'd acquired that they didn't even want to sell it at the fastest clock rates their engineers had achieved because it might embarass Intel and undermine their near-zero-profit PC business. Must have been grim working for such managers.

[@gasdive]

@garethrandall6589 I was so far down the chain that it didn't effect me personally beyond being sad that things were being handled so badly. Weirdly, as there was windows support for Alpha, they could have produced alpha desktops if they'd wanted to that would have blown every ten cent margin PC out of the water.

[@dp29192]

@@gasdive and we'd have arm pcs. It took only what 30 years and Apple to release M1 to get here lol

[@dnotive]

Great video. I'm so nostalgic for Compaq. When I was a kid my family inherited a Windows 95 Compaq Presario tower and it became my first portal to the internet. A few years later my dad was tired of how insanely slow it was, and he sprung for a Windows 98 Celeron Presario that stayed in service for almost 10 years - I upgraded every possible thing I could on it (which wasn't much). My grandparents even had a Presario laptop that I now have - I remember being young and thinking it was impressive that a laptop had JBL speakers haha. I also ended up with one of those very very last Compaq laptops around 2011 or so - a cheap and flimsy plastic thing that only set me back about $300 at the time. Some great memories with that distinctive little Q that span multiple decades, and it's neat to know the whole history.

[@nufosmatic]

25:35 - And NSA/NRO were absolutely dependent upon Alpha continuing to be available, and DEC just didn't have the horsepower to keep it going...

[@michaelm358]

In my first job c 1988, with a leading strategy consultancy, we had a few of the brand new Compaq 386 models. I remember them vividly and even the noise the hard disk made. They were our 'Ferraris' used only on special projects to crunch big spreadsheets (Lotus 123 of course) or big databases. Happy days

[@georgeh6856]

I had a friend at one time who was a software engineer at Tandem. He said that once they got bought up by Compaq, everything sucked. He said that before, their mission was to make the best fault-tolerant computers for their customers. After they were taken over by Compaq, he said the priority became cutting costs.

[@davidgoodnow269]

Wasn't _Dilbert_ set at a Compaq subsidiary?

[@gglovato]

The Tandem buy was one of the worst mistakes(if not the first) by compaq, they had no stake in that small niche of the industry nor the need to go there and there was really nothing that Tandem had that could trickle down or be of use to the X86 world (or not until decades later where RAS features started appearing stock on current EPYC/XEON). They could've bought a food manufacturer or a camera company for all the good it did

[@garethrandall6589]

They gave up on all the cool tech that DEC had as well, especially the Alpha processor which was faster than anything Intel produced.

[@Cordycep1]

I knew all of DELL backend still run on Tandem. They try so many time to get rid of it .

[@BixbyConsequence]

@@davidgoodnow269 Iirc, Dilbert creator worked at Pacific Bell when he developed the comic.

[@doctorpatient519]

informative and entertaining presentation! I found it interesting to pause the video at 7:02 and look closely at the chips on the mobo: you'll see more than a few Motorola and NEC chips around the board, but dig that 4x8 memory array in the lower right corner -- all with the AMD logo

[@lord_haven1114]

When I was 13 my Compaq stopped working. Had to send it in for repair. I got it back and it was filled with pics of dead mutilated bodies (like from those websites such as bestgore etc). That really screwed me up. I never told my mom because my dad was deployed at the time so I didn’t want to worry or concern her. The Compaq techs shouldn’t have used my computer to look up screwy stuff because they don’t know who it’s going to. I knew enough to find the history but not enough to not look to see what they were looking at using my pc. Oh well

[@potbellyfatguyfromnewyorkcity]

wow

[@clivedinosaur8407]

Thanks, I really love these videos featuring the history of technology & the companies involved. I'm in my 50s so videos like this are very nostalgic and takes me on a trip down memory lane.

[@tomholroyd7519]

I remember calling them "luggable" computers --- I think Compaq helped create this definition

[@freeculture]

But the Osborne I was first, which obviously Compaq copied.

[@justliberty4072]

@@freeculture and Kaypro

[@WolfmanDude]

I have a mainboard with one of those DEC Alpha CPUs right here, finally I know where its from! I assumed it was some kind of server thing, just kept it as a display piece because its gold :)

[@oxylus7223]

8:19 yes that is the writer. He’s a big Creative Commons supporter and releases all of his work with a CC license. Including photos

[@Caderic]

What are you talking about?

[@paul_boddie]

@@Caderic Cory Doctorow. Read the caption!

[@magicpunk828]

Common goods manufacturing is a very competitive market and computers became common goods in early 90s. Compaq pretty much built the market for cheap computers, but they could no longer compete with manufacturers based in lower income (cheaper workforce) countries. Compaq was not a premium brand (like Apple), so it made no difference for people that they were paying extra for Compaq brand, they preferred a no-name, cheaper version of same product. Same reason IBM dropped consumer grade computer department.

[@nikolatasev4948]

Commoditization of PCs may be bad for some companies, but it is great for consumers. I can slap components together and get a working desktop computer - why should a giant corporation that didn't build anything get a 10-20% of that cost? They didn't build anything, only assembled stuff, and assembly simply does not cost that much. Branded PCs make some sense for laptops, so far, but I am waiting for the day I could assemble my own laptop. It would be heavier and bigger than custom-built ones, of course, but cheaper and just what I would need.

[@sirkingdomcome3324]

Compaq portable @1:40 in 1983, I lug it around O'hara Airport catching flight, it's so well built, I can use it as a stool, whenever I need to wait in line

[@free2choose80]

I miss my old Compaq Presario. Those were good durable machines. I had mine for 9 years.

[@FrustratedApe]

Excellent video. I have always been a Compaq fan and have used Prolinea, Deskpro, Proliant, LTE, Presario and even Prosignia servers, laptops and desktops in the 1995-2007 era. I still own my 2004 Presario R3116 laptop from the HP era. I remember the Deskpro 2000/4000 desktop designs having really nice aesthetics. Wish I still had my rather rare Deskpro EX 560.

[@Vachalen]

You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain.

[@controlfreak1963]

I bought three of their 11x17 laser printers for my Engineering company and they were amazing. Unfortunately they didn't sell printers very long before they killed the division.

[@rca7591a]

I used to work on their manufacturing campus. I miss those days.

[@rca7591a]

Nowadays, if you want a decent workstation you have to undertake build of your own. CHATGPT can be helpful in determining compatibility of components and can save a lot of tedious research and guess work. I've had good luck purchasing the used dual Xeon servers from Dell.

[@frankschuler2867]

Our very first home computer was a 486 Compaq Presario in 1994. That thing was a beast. Dad kept it on life support as long as he could via various upgrades over the years. It never died! It just became so obsolete that it could no longer be upgraded. They made some great machines.

[@RobCoops]

Looking at the remains of Compaq which as mentioned ended up a takeover victim of HP we can see a serious issue. The majority of people remaining are based in France and as any internationally operating company will tell you that is not a good thing. The employee protection is extreme essentially making it so that once one has a permanent contract firing the person is near impossible. In this dat and age the European operations of HP are seriously hampered by the very heavy weight of their French organization that knows they do not have to do essentially anything other than show up and collect their pay which is exactly how they "work". As you can see from the way there was no interest in moving fast when it was desperately needed there was and still is a huge resistance to moving fast and this is visible in the way HP operates these days certainly in their European operations.

[@twelfthdoctor4402]

One of the best computers I have ever owned was a Compaq. A real work horse. I upgraded that thing and kept using it for years.

[@MagnusPaul1976]

In my after-school studies, I completed the full course on Lotus 1-2-3 on a Compaq and I am glad that I did, because it made understanding and using Microsoft Office today so much easier.

[@rlosable]

Our second PC was a Compaq Presario, with its weird special UI instead of the standard windows desktop and an animated Patrick Steward explaining how it worked. The UI was pointless, but I had everything explained by Picard, so I loved it! 😂

[@TG-Maverick22]

You just beautifully summarized almost 3 decades of information in one video. I enjoyed learning this history. 5/5!

[@TheRiskyBrothers]

At my house the Tragedy of Compaq was when my little brother put a chocolate chip cookie in the disk slot.

[@MattyHild]

@7:28 unsure why ibm dips in 1988 but comes back to 14% in 1989? Data looks inconsistent. Is there any explanation?

[@PaulSmith-zt7ix]

Please do video on semiconductor research and development budgets

[@Pooneil1984]

I’m from Houston. The headquarters of compaq. I was working at another it company when they did the first round of layoffs. We were swarmed with applications. The difference in salary our company paid out off many former Compaq people. Even HP has moved out of the old campus now. Italy ghost town.

[@Aranimda]

In the early 2000s, Compaq PC's were expensive and slow compared to the competition. They were only interesting for large business customers with their extensive service and warranty options.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Quality was very high though. In a contract containing 5,000 deskpro machines, the only three calls I ever had pertaining a defunct machine were due to failed hard drives and one single case of a failed system board. This was over a period of three years between 2000 and 2003. Reliability has its value.

[@Carewolf]

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Not in my experience, they were of significantly worse quality than noname products

[@ThioJoe]

My first computer was a Compaq desktop from Circuit City 😂

[@keithej2]

I worked at the Tomball (Houston) campus from 1988 to 1992. It was the 2nd best job I had in my 50 years of working. From an employee prospective, things were starting looking bleak in 1992. I left to go to HP (Vancouver, WA) which was the best job (1992 to 2001) I ever had. When the vote camp up to buy Compaq, I voted no because i knew they would outsource and cannibalize Compaq.

[@guyrosinbaum7745]

I worked there about the same time. I loved the rotating lunch spots on the 2nd floor ring. I left there to run the Enron Oil and Gas servers. I was there after the Enron collapse

[@heritage80elite]

I pass the exit for Compaq Center Drive on my daily commute down 249 south!

[@DanielH874]

Our first family computer was a Compaq. Good memories. Really does not seem so long ago..... Yet we are talking close to thirty years. Crazy how fast life has passed by and how quickly technology continues to grow.

[@malekzin4788]

The thumbnail is the same Celeron compaq PC that I bought at best buy for $600 in 2000. Today, $600 gets you a Mac Mini which can rival supercomputer of 2000s. Amazing progress

[@DavidtheDoom]

Thanks! I did get my first own bought computer in 2010, a Compaq netbook. It wasn't very good, but not due to the name of the case but rather due to the lackluster components inside.

[@shodanxx]

Their innovation was to break IBM's poorly protected walled garden. Once you've done that there isn't much room for growth.

[@tonycrabtree3416]

Yeah, the Proliant wasn’t any growth. 🤡🤡🤡

[@BobSmith-dk8nw]

Thanks. That was interesting. I knew a lot about Compaq's early days and owned one of the first "Luggables" I had 4 half height drives in there and would pop the plastic case up - to serve as a prop for paper work - while I had a small fan clipped to the case to blow into the circuit boards to keep the system cool. After 2005 I became less informed of things in the Computer Industry. .

[@tomholroyd7519]

5:11 even in 1990 nobody mentions Intel, it's always just "IBM compatible" 7:18 Wow, just "the new 80386" no brand mention at all

[@filanfyretracker]

Intel was not the only x86 maker up through the 486, Well more importantly there was uh brand blurryness? not sure how to call it but for example we had a Compaq with a 486DX4 and I eventually saw it was an AMD. But nowhere on the casing of the PC did it mention a processor maker. It really seems like Intel did not start to exert its brand in the consumer mind space until Pentium(586).

[@kittymogulco]

Thank you for this video. I'd been wanting to find a comprehensive documentary that fully covered the causes behind the demise of such a pivotal case study on innovation as this one. Thank you.

[@georgeburns7251]

I had an Osborne luggable computer before Compaq was even a company

[@davidbarker7030]

I remember setting up a shipment of DEC Rainbow IBM-clone PCs in the early 80's. It was an exciting time.

[@randyjohnson2794]

We upgraded from an Osborne with Visicalc and a CPM operating system to a Compaq "portable" with DOS and Lotus 1-2-3. A year later, we purchased the 5 MB hard drive model!

[@techcode_man]

Thanks for putting this video out. Brought back so much memories from the 90's when I used to work for a compaq distributor in singapore. The Proliant servers were way ahead of the time in those daya. The hot pluggable hard drive and the RAID controllers compaq introduced were beyond marvelous at that time. They were the first to introduce shrink wrapped server OS with their servers, and installing the server OS was a breeze. Best servers. HP still sells the proliant line by name.

[@mnoxman]

I remember reading in GCNews that the pentagon was going to file civil suit against Compaq for not fulfilling the maintenance contracts for the various DEC equipment. I also remember that Compaq sold the Alpha chip to Intel who made the I-tanic out of it and then fired all the good HP engineers because of that mistake. To this day there are many engineers that curse Carly and many other CEOs for ruining HP. Semiconductors, Instrument , Calculator and Medical, HPUX, divisions all were spun off and all lost market share or were bought and sold many times punishing the innovators and rewarding the vandals.

[@peterfireflylund]

Your memory is not very good.

[@gus473]

@@mnoxman Actually, the Agilent spinoff strikes me as a success within a narrow, specialized slice of the analytical instruments business.

[@paul_boddie]

The story about what happened to Digital's semiconductor activities is probably worth a video in its own right. Although Intel got access to various semiconductor technologies and took over Digital's fabrication business, Alpha remained with Digital, then Compaq, and then HP. At one point, Samsung was making Alpha chips as a licensee. But certainly, there might have been a reliance on Intel for Alpha fabrication given the way that Digital's business was structured. Intel did take over the StrongARM business from Digital, which was carried forward as XScale before Intel sold it off to Marvell. Itanium is more related to HP and their VLIW efforts that followed on from the introduction of PA-RISC. One can argue that HP was foolish in discontinuing their own PA-RISC architecture and the acquired Alpha architecture in favour of something, gladly encouraged by Intel for their own benefit, that was overengineered and never really performed well outside certain niche applications (where other architectures could have been used, anyway). That whole debacle ended up costing Intel pretty dear, too.

[@garethrandall6589]

@@paul_boddie The irony is that Intel made their fortune because it was so difficult to change the underlying CPU architecture, then wondered why the Itanium failed commercially for exactly that reason. If it was easy to get IT managers to switch to a different architecture then they would have never stayed with Intel's rubbish x86 architecture (1MB limit, real mode, PC/AT interrupt conflicts, rubbish I/O until PCI+USB) and the world would probably still be a mix of MIPS, PPC, Alpha, HP-PA, x86, x86_64, ARM etc to this day!

[@poofygoof]

Itanium was more PA-RISC than Alpha. Intel did scoop up a lot of ex-DEC employees, though, as well as DEC's Hudson campus including a fab. Things like SMT, inter-socket connections (QPI and later), and on-die memory controllers (no more north bridge) were heavily influenced by DEC ideas and ex-employees.

[@DanJanTube]

A failure of marketing. Circa 1995, in the midst of the CD-ROM boom, Compaq had a great product on their hands, the Presario All-in-One. A CRT-based computer with everything built into a single housing. The CPU, the CD-ROM, even the speakers. It sold fairly well but did not get a big advertising push from the company. Fast-forward to 1998. Apple Computer introduces almost the exact same design, the iMac G3 in a candy-colored translucent housing, with a multi-million-dollar advertising blitz. They sold a million of them in the first couple months, and it arguably saved the company.

[@Socrates21stCentury]

I worked for Lucent when Carly Fiorina went to Compaq .. everyone at Lucent laughed, as she had destroyed Lucent, and we all knew Compaq was now also doomed. Wokeness in it's infancy ... she was a "Woman", so she had to be smarter than a "Man" ... right ??? Well, not so much ... and it turned out you actually have to be smart, rather than just wear a dress ... RiP Compaq !!!

[@chmeee9562]

Yes, I was at Lucent at that time as well when Carly was there. She was severely disliked and basically drove it into the ground.

[@mrflamewars]

My parents had a Presario 4160 from 1997 (?) and it was definitely the super budget model - it always seemed broken somehow with how slow it was - the thing was a Pentium 150 and the 120Mhz machines at school were always faster and more responsive than it was even after I secretly and slightly overclocked it to 166MHz by moving the bus speed select jumper from 60 to 66MHz and begged, borrowed and stole it from 24MB to 72MB of RAM - this was 4 16MB SIMMs and 8MB on the motherboard explaining the weird total. Part of it was that it didn't have any L2 Cache - had the solder pads for the COASt module slot on the motherboard but no slot. It would not run MS Monster truck madness at the Pentium 166 setting (this is how it was selected in that game) well at all and I always had to use the lowest setting and still got a terrible choppy framerate. I distinctly remember it being so slow that it would draw in the icons in the explorer in Windows 95 singly - one after the other and this always infuriated me. In addition to being overclocked a bit It got a bigger and faster HDD and an ATI Rage 128 video card and it was still a s l u g - no amount of reinstalling windows or pruning bloatware or anything ever did much to change it the damn thing was just kind of fked up somehow. I know it used the 430VX chipset which was the cheapest one but that can't have been that much of an impact?

[@dziban303]

man who cares

[@mrflamewars]

@@dziban303 Frog Blast the Vent Core.

[@CC-bn2ws]

Carly was a bad decision, but I'm shocked HP is still around since they have been awful for so long. They once made a great printer, they never made a good pc, now they make nothing well. But even little kid me thought compaq was awful too, and the PC my mom and step dad bought was a packard bell, a 486 dx2 with no internet, that I wasn't allowed to use unless they needed me to fix something they did or show them how to do something on it that they needed done.

[@TheVault1999]

Worked for DEC and then Compaq

[@N_g_er]

Gay

[@sativagirl1885]

contractors made way more money

[@Katchi_]

@@sativagirl1885 Nope.

[@ContemplativeCat]

Another excellent video. Thank you Asianometry.