Columbia Data Products, Inc. (CDP) is a company which produced the first legally reverse-engineered IBM PC clones, starting with the MPC 1600 series in 1982.

IBM had published the bus and BIOS specifications, wrongly assuming that this would not be enough to facilitate unlicensed copying of the design, but be enough to encourage the add-on market.

The MPC also included two floppy disk drives, one parallel and two serial ports, which were all optional on the original IBM PC.

[7] BYTE in November 1984 approved of the portable MPC-VP's PC compatibility, reporting that it ran Microsoft Flight Simulator, WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE II, and other popular applications without problems.

[9] In February 1984, IBM announced the introduction of their first portable PC, thus putting pressure on its competitors in this niche as well, which besides CDP already included Compaq as the market leader in this segment, as well as Kaypro, TeleVideo Corporation, and Eagle Computer.

Discussing the perspectives of the smaller PC firms like CDP, Eagle, or Corona Data Systems, one Morgan Stanley analyst was quoted in the June 9, 1984, issue of the New York Times saying "Some of them are operating at 5 percent pretax margins, and there is just no room for more price cuts.

[citation needed] They developed and licensed Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) software to Western Digital (WD), a supplier of hard drive controllers.