Compaq Portable (Halt & Catch Fire) - Computerphile
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- Опубліковано 17 вер 2024
- The Compaq portable was the first IBM compatible machine and its creation inspired the AMC TV Show "Halt and Catch Fire."
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
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Halt and Catch Fire was an awesome show. Everyone should find it and watch all four seasons.
I still have the Compaq Portable I bought in 1983 and started my business on stored in my loft. I took it with me on my first trip (of many) to the USA and was stopped at the customs in Miami and asked "why are you bring a sewing machine with you on a flight from the UK?"
It wouldn't run Doom, but it would run the Leather Goddess of Phobos (as recently mentioned in the movie 'The Martian'), Zork, Planetside, and all the other Infocom text adventures that got me hooked on computer gaming. It still works to this day.
i wanted to buy a computer - saw that box there.. two floppy units.. thought for a while.. and decided.. no..f..way.. - if feld it to limited.. bought a 386DX25
much better.. for a bit more money
Never thought I'd live to see the day where a famous youtube channel on the internet talks about a ridiculously underrated tv show and its connection with the real world technology. Love it!
I do like this historic computer stories. Please more of this!!
I restored one of these last year, fantastic machine for the time.
The Access Actrix DS was much better.
I designed and built a piece of automated test equipment into one of those 80286 Luggables. It had the advantage of a couple full-sized ISA slots into which I plugged my boards. It was controlled via commands to its serial port. It worked very reliably for years, long after the PC inside was considered hopelessly outmoded.
We know about halting, but is the "catching fire" problem decidable?
Eminently decidable ..... it all depends on the heat capacity of the substrate, the ignition temperature and activation energy of the combustion reaction, and the energy available from the power supply.
Thanks for the little extra video on this gem, highly appreciated
Reverse engineering is still legal in UK and Europe.
I think the argument is that today IBM would have been gotten some bogus software patent to bollix up the situation. At that time software patents were not be issued based on the (what I think is valid) argument that software is just a mathematical algorithm, and those aren't patentable.
Legal in USA and many other countries as well. There's no reason to outlaw it, since it produces a functionally equivalent but wholly different result.
Reverse engineering is legal in the US as well. You just have to follow the clean room approach. The reason why so few companies attempted it early on (and what the drama of the show focuses on in the first season) is that IBM had hordes of lawyers and connections to throw at anything that got in their way. Like when the lawsuit went nowhere in the first season of HCF, they simply took all of Cardiff's software customers away instead.
@@richdobbs6595 I find it extremely dishonest to hear that something you cannot think up yourself but can study piece by piece from someone's labor is called non-invasive and unpatentable. Were it not for IBM - we'd be counting on our fingers up until now.
And then HP bought compaq and it was never the same.
Kind of destroyed both companies.
It became known as comcrap.
I had one of these as a teenager in the 90s....i remember lugging it to school and playing snake in qbasic, and using a 1200 baud modem to dialup into PC-Connect, which later became AOL.....and then using telnet to go to bbs's and chat with others. It had a 10 MB hard drive which I never thought I'd never fill up, I used office 1.0 or 1.1 on it to type some papers in high school. I remember it was a lil heavy, like a suitcase...not a laptop!
Black box reverse engineering is still legal. It's perfectly fine, as long as your implementation is completely your own work (no outside information beyond public knowledge)
The thing that gets you to the thing
This is one of the computers I've always wanted.
I've got two Portable IIIs. One 286, and one 386.
My first computer!!
You're close to 1M subs, congrats😃
Don't think that's quite fair on the BIOS re-engineering effort: the idea was that you give 8086 programmers the API for the PC BIOS - which isn't copyright - and then they write code which performs those API functions. Provided you can show that no actual code was copied (most easily done by not letting the programmers read the BIOS listing published in the IBM tech ref, or a disassembly) then not only was no law broken, no principles of law were either. Oracle sued Google for using Java APIs in a similar way, a court case that went through multiple appeals, but the initial jury decision and the final appeal decision in 2016 both said that using APIs for re-engineering was fair use. This legal battlefield has been periodically refought since the 60s (when IBM tried to stop 'plug compatible' third party expansions for its mainframes, and failed) and has always come out that you cannot copyright the functionality of interfaces. You can copyright design elements, sometimes, as with the Apple/GEM/Windows 'look and feel' stuff in the 1980s, but even that's grey.
proudsnowtiger I was about to say, clean-room cloning is still employed today. The clone BIOS would have no trouble surviving a lawsuit today.
why on earth did oracle sue google that was like shooting yourself in the foot android apps back then where all coded in java why woulndt you want more people using your product?
@@SimonBauer7Why in the world would you want them using your product if you're not going to profit from it?
There was another contemporary called Hyperion. Which was slightly lighter and smaller, and cheaper. But it has rather horrible screen.
Compaq portable was selling so so, when it arrived, and sellers did not want to stock it because IBM was preparing own portable. But Compaq decided to produce anyway, and have them on hand hoping that IBM will slip up. And IBM did slip up, delaying launch by at least 6 months. Compaq with all stock on hand, was able to quickly sell it to sellers and dealers, and rest is the history.
Compaq was enormous. If you notice left, on the left there is another Compaq computer. DEC Alphastation XP1000, in standardish PC case, with red oval logo on the top. Yes, Compaq had so much money that they did buy DEC (Digital Equipement Corporation), that was on the level of IBM for decades in terms of size, technology and innovation. Few years later they merged with HP.
I had one of these computers, long after it was obsolete. Dual double-density 5.25" floppy disk drives, 128K RAM. It was a nice computer to BBS with when I was grounded from the family 486, once I put a 2400 baud modem in.
The Hayes underground movement ...
@herauthon four: all I could afford was a cheap clone. When I had a 2400 baud modem it was a Compudyne, which I'm gathering was a brand more than a manufacturer. Had Zoom 14400 and 33600, it was probably the 14400 that I put into the Compaq, I think the 33.6 was 16 bit ISA. Been a couple decades, memory might be mistaken though.
I have a Compaq Portable 286 which still powers up, but since the small internal batteries that held the date & time have died, it requires the "Advanced Diagnostics Disk" to boot...which I no longer have :(
The battery can be replaced. There are also disk images of the Compaq BIOS setup diskette on the Internet.
And now we come to something I have a personal connection with: the Compaq Portable, the first computer I ever used.
Thanks for great videos. Are there any Commodore PET 600 in this museum? Can't find it through a search on their site.
I noticed the keyboard has a PrintScreen key (@ 1:21), before graphics was this key used to literally print the screen?
Yes
Thank you.
Remember that not only was the screen "text only" but so were the majority of the printers.
Actually this was not an achievement. It actually set back computing immensely, and it's taken us decades to recover from it. There were superior systems to IBM's brain dead way of doing things. Namely CP/M rather than DOS. And DOS and Windoze would have quietly died off it werent' for this BIOS reverse engineering effort. CP/M was a beautiful operating system and was used on many machines at the time, so we ALREADY had an "open" system for personal computing at this time, and it was GREAT. And this same year the Compaq came out, there were already better portable machines in terms of hardware. Namely, the Access Actrix DS. IT had a printer AND an acoustic modem built into it. I have some great memories of using my Actrix at various payphones so that I could access computers all over teh world remotely, but not do it from my house (catch my drift). Another handy tool was a specially modified Radio Shack pocket dialer. Man those were the days!
I found an identical working computer in a warehouse about 16 years ago. About five years ago my parents donated to the computer collection at Bletchley Park. I wonder if this is the computer I found??
I would love to know?
+James Bowen hey, probably not as this isn't TNMOC (Bletchley) but CCH, I'm sure it also has a good home! >Sean
Here is still a Osborne 1, i remember there was a big battery pack available for the O1 but not the exact details.
How does its computing power compare with that of a dead fish? I know the Portable II was significantly better than one.
Only John Cleese can say.
I remember lugging one of those things around years ago.
But.. Will it run DOOM?
Need a 486 for that...
Yes, assuming that you can successfully make the DOOM engine run on it.
hoppes9 Not true. As a poor kid I played doom on a 364 for two whole years. Display scaled down to about the size of half a stamp, it even ran quite smooth. With framerates of a whopping 10 or so per second.
@kduhtdkzrt
What a great time to be alive :D
Wolfenstein 3D maybe.
Very nice DEC AlphaServer visible to Jason's right. Please video-review it.
My uncle gave me one of these as my first computer in 1989. I saved up to buy a 600 baud modem for $300.00. Those were the days.
I used to own one of these. Really heavy.
i use to have one of these!!! I removed the 5.25's and installed 3.5's and a hard disk!
History is told by the winners. Compaq was the most successful PC clone (and later coming out with the 386 before IBM did had a huge impact on computing history) but it was not the first. People make a big deal about their "clean room" lawyer driven BIOS reverse engineering but in practice this was overkill as other companies that took far less care in creating their own BIOSes were able to get away with it.
Do you guys have a Compaq Portable 486c? That machine is super rare to find...!
My first PC was a Compaq, the number of hours I spent playing around with that thing...
First computer I did much with was a compaq, 20GB HDD, win 98, 128MB RAM, DVD rom, LS120 floppy. I guess at the time that was high end now that seems like nothing.
I saw an Amiga 2000 on the shelf at 4:11
I have a Compaq Portable 486c.
It has an ethernet card so I can even go online with it...!
Gold finger.... are you right now ?
First learned about "Halt and Catch Fire" from Zachtronics' TIS-100. Pleasantly surprised there's also a TV series carrying the name of that "bug".
They could probably do a variety episode on HCF / "killer poke" / "Lp0 on fire" / other older programmer humor.
0:29 What is he afraid of? Compaq suing him for slander? They're a long gone cautionary tale.
You better not tell any of us that actually work at Compaq that they're long gone.
Take one to an internet cafe. LOL.
There is nothing morally questionable about what Compaq did. They made their own chip, with their own BIOS software, designed to replace the functionality of IBM's BIOS ROM chip without even peeking at IBM's code at all. That should always be completely legal and if it's illegal then we need to change the law to make it legal again.
what is this? I assumed it would tell me about halt and catch fire problems
teddy boragina Did you watch the video? Its about the Compaq Portable computer, the creation of which was dramatized in the television show Halt and Catch Fire. Computerphiles love computers, especially older ones with interesting histories like being the first IBM compatible.
There's no such thing as a halt and catch fire problem. HCF is just an instruction to shut down the CPU so that it requires a restart.
I played Jumpman and Burger Time on one of those.
It's hard to know what he's talking about without watching "Silicon Cowboys" or living through it
I watched a BBC documentary and I am sure Microsoft did the same trick for DOS.
They bought DOS, but it was heavily based on CP/M
at least amstrad was straight forward about nicking ibm controllers
I was expecting a video about the Halt and Catch Fire operation code, not a computer from a movie.
I used to actually have that same computer but I knew it as the Compaq Briefcase. Of course when I had it Windows 98SE had had only recently been released.
But how is it different from other computers? Or other old conputers?
Lohit Chhabra FIRST IBM Compatible PC not by IBM themselves.
John Francis Doe Ohhh okay i get it now
i actually live in houston
We called these "luggables".
But will it run the nano editor
Yes.
Was the company Compaq at this point or was it still DEC?
Compaq. They acquired Digital in 1998.
Compaq was never DEC. It's DEC that became Compaq.
how are they so clean lol my 3 year old computer looks older than those..
NichoTBE heh, my guess is that they've obviously been cleaned and restored at some point.
The standard should be as follows.. .
If one man can drag an object by 1 meter in 1 minute, It's portable.
ProCactus yes, but you'd also have to factor in how many grunts and groans per minute.
Will it run pong???
Portable? More like 'luggable', LOL
Paula J. Bean the "Compaq Backbreaker" model.
0:25 No.... that's *not* what the BIOS is, since the BIOS *is* the low level software.
0:40 That's called using a "clean room" design.
1:38 No, it's *not* questionable *at all.*
do you need a lie down?
Obvious mistakes: 1. The BIOS is not a chip, it's a program. 2. IBM had published the source code in their manual, reverse engineering was a matter of reading it and describing it without quoting it, like in one of those quiz challenges. 3. A very similar process was later used to clone UNIX (via the published POSIX standard and textbooks written about the inner workings) and most of Microsoft Windows (as Wine and ReactOS).
The bios is held on a single chip.....
It is irrelevant that the BIOS was stored on a chip. They did not reverse engineer the chip. In fact, they probably used the same kind of chip. They reverse engineered the code that was stored on the chip.
i'd imagine #2 was because of some legal reasons. just so no one can say you used their code.
The trick with reverse engineering it was that if you used the manual then IBM would be able to argue that you copied it even if you didn't quote it directly. Instead they had the person who was writing the BIOS never look at the manual. They'd write some small part and the people helping would simply tell him just 'yes or no' whether or not he had achieved the correct functionality of that part before moving on to the next bit. That way they weren't passing on any information directly and so it wasn't copied.
Will it run crisis ....?
^ Doom
TheFk
Âàdô
But...Will it be invincible to spectre/meltdown? :D
SimGunther - Maybe though I think you needed at least 2 of them to do out of order execution...
Definitely impervious to either.
for some people, one already is an out of order execution..
Your face, can halt and catch fire. X3
Now i feel like i wanna watch the movie, this can be a very nice commercial for it
It's a TV series.
FellToRise sorry, didn't know that, what is it called?
As someone else mentioned "Halt and Catch Fire" is a TV series. However, there is a documentary movie about the founding of Compaq and the creation of the Compaq Portable, it's called "Silicon Cowboys".
Jonathan Guthrie. Well, thanks a lot. I'll definetly check it out.
Definitely recommend giving Halt and Catch fire a try. One of my favorite shows of last year that had an amazing 4 season run.
Yes it was a _clone_ .
I had a Compaq once. You could only use Compaq parts in it, else it wouldn't boot. Worst computer I've ever had.
1st lmao