Compaq Computer Corporation is the American producer of personal computers. The corporation has at its disposal 17 factories that manufacture computer hardware in Great Britain, USA, Malaysia, Brazil and China.
It was created in 1982 by former Texas Instruments workers who were disappointed in management of their company. Originally, they planned to start creating peripheral devices (disc drives in particular) for already existing computers. However, they were convinced to get down to inventing their own PC.
The road to recognition began with the initial budget of 3.000 USD ($1.000 from each co-founder) and PC architecture outlined during dinner at one of the restaurants of Texas.
An advertising agency was entrusted to make up the name for the new company. Later, “Compaq” was interpreted as a word combination of “compatibility” and “quality”.
In the year of its creation, Compaq introduced its first invention – portable PC (Compaq Portable). This product is considered to be the predecessor of modern portable computers. It is totally IBM-compatible, i.e. it can launch the software designed for IBM personal computers. This portable PC was rather successful: around 53.000 devices were sold in one year. Compaq constituted a serious menace for IBM back then, because the machines it produced were more productive and cheaper.
For some time, Compaq was the largest computer producing company in the world: in 1998, it released more PC than its three rivals together.
In 2002, Compaq Corporation was amalgamated with HP but reserved the right to make products under its trade mark (particularly, personal computers, personal digital assistants and servers). At these times, its main competitors were Lenovo, Acer, Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens.
However, during 2000s, HP dismissed thousands of Compaq workers, Compaq’s share prices considerably decreased and it became unprofitable yielding in the market to Dell. In fact, Compaq ceased to exist as the independent company then.
In 2010, the last notebook under the Compaq Presario brand was assembled. Since then, all devices were produced as HP products.
