You mean it wasn't for bottom feeders, earlier in life?

How long has the author been in this industry? Maybe Compaq was a rather expensive brand in the last years before it was acquired by HP, but that was not the case earlier. Initially it was one of very few competitors to IBM in PC hardware, and being cheap was a key component of the package.

Yep, Compaq really has no case for charging a price premium now. Both Compaq and HP's higher-end brands were previously able to charge some price premium due to innovative designs (in some cases) and good technical support (in others).

Well, first things Fiorna did when she took over HP was to cut technical support costs by outsourcing it to the lowest bidder, and decide that HP can just put together off-the-shelf machines and cut the R&D. So, really, what makes a Compaq worth a price premium over some random machine? Nothing really.

Now that she is out, it's possible HP can turn it around I suppose -- they aren't bankrupt yet by a long shot. But it'll take a while.

Yes, when will they bring back the Digital Equipment Corporation as a brand name, for computers with brightly colored front panels? Maybe they could buy Apple, and rechristen the Macintosh as the PDP-32?

I had a digital Ultra Highnote laptop (486 sx2 50, 350Mb hdd, dual scan colour screen, floppy drive no CD and a trackBALL). I still think that this was the most comfortable laptop I have used for any length of time (since had; IBM TPs, Compaq various, Dell various). The little wedge for the floppy drive that you could unscrew was genius (back in the mid-late nineties at least)...

Aside from that I always saw Compaq and Toshiba as somewhere near the same level, maybe Toshia a touch better and they usually were move expensive than say your Gateways/Dells, and UK brands that were around at the time (your Eveshams, Elonex', Time, Tiny etc) (though not as pricey as IBMs Thinkpads). But having had a Dell and then a second hand Compaq M300, I could see why, the Compaq was far better made (infact the M300 is still going strong even though it is a PII 300~Mhz, long after the Dell bit the dust).

Just my tupence worth...

Dan

Blimey, this is a blast from the past! I was in a big reseller of Compaq tin for over 6 years back in the late Nineties and it was damned good stuff priced to fight. They gave Sun a good hiding when they brought out their rival workstation at under half the price of a Sparc and the tussles with Dell were huge fun to be involved with. The Digital notebooks were very classy bits of work - if I remember correctly the designer moved to IBM? - and to me it was the dying days of real thought in creating laptops with original thinking instead of incremental improvements.

Here's a Christmas quiz for everyone; What did Compaq stand for?

No Googling!

Being around for more than 5 years I can safely say Compaq did make good pc's. They were pricey, but quick and reliable, until....

They decided they could charge the same higher prices, for cheap, generic hardware, badly put together and poorly supported. That was the downfall

They were called Compaq because when you ordered one it would com in a big paq.

As far as I can remember it was Compatibility and Quality. All that changed when they went for cheap and incompatible kit!

Merry Christmas All!

hohoho.

Compaqs were always known for their strange way of loading patches. The techies where I used to work found out that they had to be loaded in a specific order.

Some business-class stuff from Compaq was worth the money. My own personal experience with two consumer-market Presario systems was enough to put me off ever wanting to buy more Compaq anything, so that might fit the German need.