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?

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!

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.