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To: Scumbria who wrote (68914)	11/20/1998 7:14:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria - The product was a portable PC which was put togehter with erector set components Rod Cannion and the other ex-TI folks who started COMPAQ came from the military systems group. The original COMPAQ portables were built with mil-spec components, they were engineered from the ground up for quality. Everything in them was designed for ruggedness and reliability (this philosophy was what eventually cost Cannion his job, when the rest of the industry had gone to 'erector set' components and CPQ's costs got out of line). At a time when an IBM desktop PC could not survive a 5G shock, the CPQ portables could withstand 30G's. Cannion used to talk about how delicate PCs were, then in the middle of a sentence he would 'accidentally' drop a running COMPAQ portable from chest height onto the concrete floor. Then he would pick it up - still running - and say something like 'whew! glad this is a COMPAQ!' There were a number of instances in the first few years when CPQ engineering made the difference. Engineering the disk drives to withstand 30Gs was only part of it. They also reverse engineered the BIOS - the IBM hold on the market would have been unbreakable without that. I could go on and on and bore the thread on this topic, but the fact is that the boys from Boca were out-hustled and out-engineered. It wouldn't have mattered if IBM had production capacity or not - they still would have gotten their butts kicked. To paraphrase another Texan - I knew CPQ, CPQ was a friend of mine, and AMD is no CPQ.