My understanding is that they had pitched the IBM PC compatible machine to TI and had been rebuffed - TI had its own mostly compatible PC offering and the no one in charge was willing to admit it was a mistake.
Trailer is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wjJYqUkHd8
You can watch the documentary on Tubi https://tubitv.com/movies/559438/silicon-cowboys
The story goes that the floppy disk drive for Compaq computers was rated for a very high number of floppy disk insertions and ejections. More insertions/ejections than were possible unless one was doing nothing but inserting and ejecting floppy disks all the time.
So the exec selected a lower-rated floppy disk drive, saving a bunch of money.
os2museum.com was just recently able to trace how one particular DOS bug (more than two BIOS harddisk drives would make earlier DOS-versions hang at boot) was handled across different companies, and how and when exactly a fix made it into actual MS-DOS.
(Compaq had a fantastic reputation which they tarred with shitty consumer PCs. HPE still sells Proliants, and I'd guess they still use 'compaq screws'.)
Compaq's CEO at the time of the Compaq downsizing and eventual acquisition, Michael Capellas, is now the advisor to the company I work for. And the man who sold the Banyan Vines solution to Compaq in the 90's is now my boss.
> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.
Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.
Going to a computer shop on a random shopping mall, usually only a few gamer PCs are available as composable desktops, 90% of computers on display are laptops.
Servers are mostly designed for companies with racks or hyperscalers.
Most non technical people nowadays only have a smartphone and a tablet as computers, with the integration of all 8 and 16 bit home computers PC compatible were fighting against.
CPU from Amd/Intel, board from someone else, ram from someone else, storage from another party, OS from yet another party.
Phones are similar, maybe Samsung uses a samsung cpu, a samsung lcd, samsung ram, and samsung storage, and a Samsung build of a Google OS. More integration than Apple. Everyone else though, is still putting parts together from many suppliers.
Have you tried to build a laptop or a tablet yourself as we used to build PCs during the 1990s?
Yes we know about System 76, and similar attempts, sadly they aren't something I can find on MediaMarket, Vobis, FNAC, Saturn, Cool Blue, Carrefour,...
Really though, when the CPU has everything you need, other than ram and storage, why do you need to have a box you can mess with?
I still build my own computers, but computers at home are becoming endangered. One of my siblings simply doesn't have one, and the other only has a work computer. Many of my child's friends don't have a computer at home, unless it's a school chromebook or their parents work in tech.
https://podcasts.apple.com/tr/podcast/compaq-computers-rod-c...
saulpw•6mo ago
> That relationship had been established in late 1982. Back then, Gates had contacted Canion and asked, with some concern, if Compaq was trying to get into the operating system business. Surprised, Canion denied it. Gates told him that Microsoft was hearing worrying reports from the dealer network. People were buying copies of Compaq DOS, rather than Microsoft DOS, without buying a Compaq PC.
> Both men knew why: Microsoft DOS had never been a true copy of PC DOS, as Gates had admitted to Canion during the development of Compaq’s first machine. The differences had only increased over time, as Microsoft’s deal with IBM prohibited the same developers working on both versions. Compaq had made its own version of DOS since the beginning. With its singular focus on 100 percent compatibility, the result was a product that was more compatible with PC DOS than Microsoft’s own product.
> Word was spreading among computer buyers that Compaq DOS was better. Even people who owned other PC clones were choosing to buy that instead of Microsoft’s own public version. This could have created friction between Compaq and Microsoft. Instead, Canion did something extraordinary. Compaq withdrew Compaq DOS from sale unless it was specifically bundled with a Compaq computer. He then licensed Compaq DOS back to Microsoft.
> From Gates’s perspective, this was an incredible deal. He was able to halt all internal development on Microsoft DOS, saving time and money. From this point onward, every version of Microsoft DOS he sold was, in fact, Compaq DOS, with the digital equivalent of its serial numbers filed off. All Canion asked in return was that Microsoft never release the very latest version of DOS that Compaq provided it until after a few months’ delay. This was to make sure that Compaq always had a slight advantage in compatibility over its rivals.
> Canion even agreed to Gates’s request that they keep the entire arrangement secret, to avoid souring Microsoft’s relationships with the other clone companies. It would remain secret for almost 40 years.
BizarroLand•6mo ago
endgame•6mo ago
flomo•6mo ago
BizarroLand•6mo ago
I messed up the family PC and decided to reinstall windows on its 80mb drive that had been repartitioned to 100mb thanks to dos 6.22 and doublespace.
However, I did not have dos 6.22 install disks, I had dos 5.0 install disks and then 6.22 upgrades, and the 5.0 disks could not see the hard drive partition that doublespace had taken over, so it saw our 80mb hard drive as a 1-ish mb hard drive that was too small to install to.
Format couldn't see it, and fdisk couldn't either, so I could not start over from scratch no matter what I did.
Queue me panicking.
My mom was at work overnight. I had until she got back to fix it or I was dead meat.
I had no money, I was a child. I had no one and nothing to turn to other than the user manuals that came with the operating systems
I knew how to make a bootable floppy disk, and using that knowledge and a nat 20 inspiration roll I made a bootable dos 6.22 floppy disk that had the doublespace system on it, booted the home pc with that, used the doublespace software to revert the drive, and then was able to reinstall dos 5, upgrade to 6.22, install windows 3.1 and all of my moms software to finish up about 15 minutes before she arrived home in the morning.
The first thing my mom did when she got home was boot up the family PC. She was a little peeved that her solitaire high score got erased but everything else was fine.
ryao•6mo ago
flomo•6mo ago
passwordhelpme•6mo ago
canucker2016•6mo ago
ryao•6mo ago
By the way, the Gateway 2000 was a machine by Gateway, not a vendor.
canucker2016•6mo ago
Gateway 2000 was the actual name of the company at that time.
They dropped the 2000 close to the year 2000. I assume it wouldn't look good for a forward-looking tech company to be named for a year in the past.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_2000
ryao•6mo ago
TMWNN•6mo ago
The article is wrong about when this occurred—Compaq DOS wouldn't have been in stores in 1982; 1983 is likely the correct year—but regardless, this is an astounding revelation.
canucker2016•6mo ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms-dos, MS-DOS 3.20 was the first consumer retail version of MS-DOS (then MS-DOS 5.0 was next).
fredoralive•6mo ago
MS-DOS wasn’t a specific IBM PC OS, it was designed to be generic 8086 OS. It was up to the OEM to adapt the machine specific code (mostly in IO.SYS / IBMBIO.COM) to their system. IBM owned IBMBIO.COM, and some of the utilities like MODE and FDISK, and early on Microsoft didn’t have its own implementations to offer for people building generic PC clones. You had to write your own, and hope they were compatible. Microsoft did eventually offer a generic MS DOS with an IBM PC type IO.SYS and reimplementation of the utilities, so perhaps those are descended from Compaq’s versions?
ndiddy•6mo ago
As time went on and Microsoft started selling more and more copies of MS-DOS to manufacturers making PC clones, MS-DOS and PC DOS grew closer together, not further apart. MS-DOS 3.2 (1986) was the first version that Microsoft made available in a packaged form to OEMs that were shipping PC clones (it was still available as source code to OEMs who wanted more customization). For previous versions, OEMs were required to write their own versions of several hardware specific utilities (such as FDISK.COM and MODE.COM) that were originally written by IBM. MS-DOS 3.2 contained Microsoft-written clones of these utilities. MS-DOS 3.3 (1987) was written entirely by IBM (not Compaq!), as most of the key members of the MS-DOS team were busy working on OS/2. Because it came out after the Microsoft-IBM joint development agreement, Microsoft gained the rights to the IBM-written utilities and the packaged versions of MS-DOS 3.3 and all later versions shipped with the same utilities as their PC DOS counterparts.
The closest thing to the claims this article makes is that Compaq did in fact maintain their source code license to MS-DOS and made enhancements to their version. The most notable example of this is that Compaq DOS 3.31 introduced a modified version of FAT16 that supported partitions larger than 32MB. I assume Compaq licensed this functionality back to Microsoft, as there's versions of DOS 3.31 branded for other OEMs, and support for Compaq's modified FAT16 (known as FAT16B) was included in MS-DOS 4.0.
toddhodes•6mo ago