Compaq, Gone But Not Forgotten: The Best-Selling PC of the 1980s and 1990s
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psycros
Posts: 4,913 +7,644
Why do these ancient articles keep popping up in my "new" RSS feed? Was there an update somewhere?
Part of our Throwback Thursday initiative, where we 're-publish' popular articles or those are pertinent again. This happens every week
Julio edit: We also go through the articles again before the bump, sometimes updating or adding new context or facts as we see fit.
axiomatic13
Posts: 887 +1,252
Part of our Throwback Thursday initiative, where we 're-publish' popular articles or those are pertinent again. This happens every week
You guys should post old hardware reviews for giggles. I'm serious.
Post this: https://www.techspot.com/review/36-intel-core2-quad-q6600/
Then follow up with https://www.techspot.com/article/1313-intel-q6600-ten-years-later/
Vanderlinde
Posts: 646 +437
Compaq was affordable but difficult at the same time. Pre-installed software that gave them large discounts, but also propertary hardware, difficult to fix let alone repair, because compaq had it's own standard(s) in regards of hardware. Motherboards often not ATX compliant, or boards that had their own layout, power delivery and such. Also it was a horror for games since it most of the time was shipped with integrated graphics or cheap add-ons. Very rare you'll find a good GPU inside of it.
I bought a compaq laptop one day, a nefty 2000 euro, which had a mobile pentium 4 at 2.4Ghz inside of it, but a quite slow 40GB HDD that ive replaced myself with a larger, 120GB one. One day the board cracked, likely due to bad solder joints, filed it for warranty, got told "You replaced the harddrive with a non compaq so your warranty is voided" and that was that lol. Gone 2000 euro.
I bought a compaq laptop one day, a nefty 2000 euro, which had a mobile pentium 4 at 2.4Ghz inside of it, but a quite slow 40GB HDD that ive replaced myself with a larger, 120GB one. One day the board cracked, likely due to bad solder joints, filed it for warranty, got told "You replaced the harddrive with a non compaq so your warranty is voided" and that was that lol. Gone 2000 euro.
The only reason they needed saving was because AMD bought them in the first place.
That isnt vision, that's blind luck.
PEnnn
Posts: 1,285 +1,854
In other words, it's like today's Dell!!.
That why I never cared for either company.
Vanderlinde
Posts: 646 +437
The idea is buying a all in one computer pretty much for people who cant work or dont understand computers in the first place.
Fulljack
Posts: 116 +97
the AMD vision are called Fusion initiative, by integrating both CPU and GPU in one package. it what helps them stay afloat in early 2010s by providing both Sony and Microsoft chips for their console.
AMD knows where the market are going, knows what to buy, and successfully sell their products. that's not blind luck, that's business.
zamroni111
Posts: 557 +304
I met several ex compaq employees
they hate the mergers
they hate the mergers
Atmajaya2020
Posts: 226 +161
The only reason they had to "stay afloat" with fusion APUs was because the ATi acquisition left them in a terrible state, something you guys refuse to acknowledge. Sacrificing your core business to waste 2.5 BILLION (the amount they wrote off) and having to sell your HQ to stay afloat is not "good business" it is sheer idiocy. Had they instead invested a portion of that money into CPU development instead of buying ATi, AMD would have been able to go toe to toe with core 2, and wouldnt have lost its dominant position in consumer workloads, and could have kept making inroads into datacenter applications. The K9 and K10 cores would not have been 1-2 years late to market, and frankly bulldozer would not have happened.
Had it not been for Jim Keller, AMD would be bankrupt now. People seem to forget that at their lowest in the mid 2010s AMD has less then a year's revenue left in them. It was ZEN that saved AMD, not ATi. ATi merely kept them afloat for half a decade, as the CPU division that was strangled to buy ATi floundered. It was not the APUs, which fulfilled low margin low volume sales, that helped AMD, it was the high margin, high volume, zen chips that propelled AMD from $1.67 a share and losing $300 mil a quarter to over $170 a share today and PROFITING $800 mil a quarter.
Their datacenter revenue went from basically 0 to over $2.3 BILLION, all thanks to zen.
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Athlonite
Posts: 500 +235
The first PC I ever bought was a Compaq 286 with 1MB ( 4x 256KB of 30 pin SIPP) of ram and a CGA video card
I spent a few months playing around with it upgraded it with a 287 coprocessor and 1 more MB of ram (via newer 512KB x 4 30 pin SIPP modules) and a VGA card when they came out and managed to get hold of a cheap 100MB HDD and so started my PC building life (and part time business)
If you don't know what a SIPP ram module is it's basically like a 30 pin SIMM but it had legs instead that you inserted into little holes instead of a slot
I spent a few months playing around with it upgraded it with a 287 coprocessor and 1 more MB of ram (via newer 512KB x 4 30 pin SIPP modules) and a VGA card when they came out and managed to get hold of a cheap 100MB HDD and so started my PC building life (and part time business)
If you don't know what a SIPP ram module is it's basically like a 30 pin SIMM but it had legs instead that you inserted into little holes instead of a slot
And Moonbugs worked great on it. Kept my wife and young family "amused" for hours in "forced" incarceration in Saudi Arabia, while I earned the big bucks to pay for it. The advent of computer games - so this was also the first "gaming computer" available to the masses; IBM PC's being limited to "work" computing.
The computer that started the revolution to portability and evolutionary cycle for all computers currently generally available - CISC Laptops and RISC Smartphones are merely the evolution of this start. Compaq provided the base IP for Apple to evolve into their Mac's (CISC) and then to their current Smartphone (RISC) products. Its hard to understate the impact of the "Compaq" idea (IP) personal computer development. Its difficult for non-engineers to understand - but Apple did NOT revolutionize computers in any way; they merely evolved them from the foundation set by Compaq with better and better UI's. The questions is who will be the next Compaq in the computer world?
Random trivia - the HP stock ticker is still HPQ to this day. The "Q" in that comes from Compaq.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hewlett-packards-post-merger-ticker-symbol-to-change
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hewlett-packards-post-merger-ticker-symbol-to-change
Yeah. And not acquiring them would have CERTAINLY killed AMD, so it was the lesser evil choice.
Soulburn74
Posts: 150 +80
In the early 90's I worked as an independent contractor doing side work, for warranty repairs of desktop PC's. A lot of the machine's I worked on were those beige Compaqs! I had an inventory of spare MB's and HDD's as that was the usual repair work done... fast foward years later to the mid aught's, doing server administration work, it was a mix of the beige Compaq Pro-Liants and their HP successors, those things were tanks! Replacing fans/PS/and HDD's, they kept running for years and years. eventually being aged out, just due to not being able to keep up on modern OS's.
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