Compaq Portable series

As the products evolved, laptops and notebooks were created offering a new level of portability that caused the market to explode.

Compaq sold 53,000 units in the first year with a total of $111 million in revenue, an American Business record.

The machine uses a unique hybrid of the IBM MDA and CGA which supports the latter's graphics modes, but contains both cards' text fonts in ROM.

With a larger external monitor, the graphics hardware is also used in the original Compaq Deskpro desktop computer.

Compaq's efforts were possible because IBM had used mostly off-the-shelf parts for the PC and published full technical documentation for it, and because Microsoft had kept the right to license MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers.

Compaq solved this problem by producing a clean room workalike that performed all documented functions of the IBM PC BIOS, but was completely written from scratch.

Its reviewer tested IBM PC DOS, CP/M-86, WordStar, SuperCalc, and several other software packages, and found that all worked except one game.

[4] PC Magazine also rated the Compaq Portable very highly for compatibility, reporting that all tested applications ran.

Independent computer stores were previously doing this upon request of users, and Compaq saw this as a lost revenue opportunity.

The Model 1 had a list price of US$3,999 and was equipped with a 12 MHz Intel 80286, 640 KB RAM, 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy, and a 10″ amber colored gas-plasma display.