Original Compaq Portable

It has been one of my goals in vintage computing to move “back in time” to the early days of the personal computer, I’ve been intrigued by the story behind the original IBM PC, the 5150, a fascinating story of the tension between one of the classic engineering trade offs (make vs buy), and the unforeseen consequences this can have in a product development, but I’m no longer interested in collecting IBM in particular after reading this book “IBM and the Holocaust”.  So, I’ve been on the lookout for another brand XT class machine, and I was very intrigued when a damaged Compaq Portable I popped up at my local Free Geek store.  This was one of the first IBM PC clones, but they did something really different by creating a “Portable”.  I won’t rehearse the development of the machine here as it’s been covered well elsewhere.

My Compaq is an early unit, with the plastic parts stamped 1983, and a Rev. B BIOS.  When I purchased it, there was an error code at boot, so I knew that the processor and RAM were working.  The case was in rough shape, cracked and dirty, but a carrying case was included.

Once again, the Vintage Computer Forum was one of the best sources for information.  Also, the 8-bit guy did a restoration video series  on this machine, having seen these resources gave me the confidence to give this repair a shot.  There was a long list of issues with the machine, but with knowledge of how to take the machine apart, clean and lubricate floppy drives, replace the defective foam and foil pads in the keyboard, upgrade the BIOS, install an XT-CF adapter so I could boot from Flash, and upgrade the RAM to the maximum 640K, I now have a fully functional first generation PC running at 4.7Mhz.

Not shown in the picture, I moved the CF slot up to the front of the machine in the middle of the unused floppy drive bay that was opened up by removing the non-functional drive.

Update:  March 2021

I found a Tecmar Captain card and installed that in this PC, so it has a functional Real Time Clock, a working Microsoft Serial mouse.  I've installed Windows 2.0 on this machine, and that's been alot of fun to poke around with, since that version predates my first PC ownership.

Let me know if you have any questions for me about the Compaq, or other Vintage Computing topics in the comments below.