Compaq

» see compaq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Compaq was one of the global pc brands you would see on the shelves at turkish electronics retailers in the late 90s. Presario was the consumer line, the beige minitower with a cd tray you could pop open with a paperclip if the eject button stopped working. The brand traveled to turkey through the importer channel rather than through a local subsidiary, which kept compaq pricing above the white-box and local-brand options like casper and vestel.

The company began in february 1982 in houston. Three former texas instruments engineers each put down a thousand dollars to start it. Rod canion ran it as ceo, with jim harris and bill murto as cofounders. The founding sketch was a napkin drawing of a sewing-machine-sized portable. Compaq portable shipped in november 1982 as the first fully ibm-compatible mass-market clone, the unlock that broke the original ibm-pc lock-in and seeded the entire clone industry.

Brand retirement happened on february 27 2013 in an hp press release that was almost a footnote. The nameplate had not been on a flagship product in years. Hp had bought compaq in may 2002 for $25 billion and spent the next decade reabsorbing it into the pavilion and presario consumer lines until the compaq label only appeared on entry-level emerging-market sku's. After february 2013 even those were rebranded.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Compaq's breakthrough was not the portable itself but the legal homework underneath it. The founders built a clean-room reimplementation of the ibm pc bios so they could ship a fully compatible machine without infringing ibm's copyright. That approach became the template every other clone maker used after them. By 1986 compaq was the first company to ship a 386-based pc, beating ibm to the new intel generation by months. Revenue crossed a billion dollars in 1987, three years faster than any company in american business history at that point.

The 1990s were the peak decade. Compaq pushed presario as the consumer line in 1993 and proliant as the server line in 1994. By 1994 it was the largest pc vendor on earth. Dell was still the mail-order upstart at that point and acer was still mostly known for taiwan-market hardware.

~ the merger ~

The dot-com peak hid the structural problem. Compaq had bought digital equipment corporation in june 1998 for $9.6 billion, partly for the alpha cpu work and partly for the digital services arm. Integration was messy. The alpha line got wound down and dec's professional services group never fully fit. By 2001 dell had passed compaq in worldwide shipments with margin pressure that was unsustainable.

Carly fiorina's hp made an offer in september 2001 of $25 billion in stock for the whole company. Walter hewlett, son of the cofounder, ran a public proxy fight against the merger and lost narrowly in march 2002. The deal closed on may 3 2002. Inside the merged company the compaq line was demoted to consumer entry-level almost immediately. The proliant servers kept the proliant name and the workstation line got the pavilion brand from hp's older consumer division.

~ what carried over ~

The clone-bios approach compaq legitimized in 1982 is the reason every laptop in 2026 still boots a bios or uefi descended from the original ibm pc. That lineage is invisible now, but the entire windows pc industry runs on a compatibility layer that compaq made possible. The company that built it was already a memory by 2013 when hp finally turned the name off. In turkey the presario nameplate hung on the longest in the entry-level segment, mostly because hp shipped emerging-market sku's under that label well after the us catalog had moved on.

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