- [Narrator] It's the 1980s,
a time with some very interesting fashion choices.
But more importantly from our perspective,
a point in time when the personal computer
started to take off.
Several computer manufacturers have already started
to take off.
With Apple in the States getting a good foothold
into the educational market,
CPM starting to dominate the business markets,
and in the UK there's a burgeoning home micro scene.
While all this has been happening,
one company has been sitting in the background
watching this whole scene develop,
the sleeping giant that is IBM.
At this point in time,
IBM's primary business is that of mainframes.
Huge chunking great big computers
that could fill an entire data center
and use more electricity
than small housing estates.
IBM has nearly 68% share of this market,
making it one of the largest
computer companies in the world.
Some in IBM realized that the rise of the personal computer
represents a threat to their business,
and that many of their competitors
are starting to work on their own machines.
So in order for IBM to avoid missing out
on this potentially lucrative market,
IBM's managing director sets up a new business unit.
This new business unit exists
outside the normal IBM hierarchy,
is allowed to do things in its own way.
The sole focus of this new,
extremely well-funded business unit,
was to create a brand new personal computer.
A personal computer they code named Chess.
Normally when IBM created a new machine,
they do everything from the silicon all the way through
to the operating system.
However in the case of this new business unit,
they were given one year
to create their new personal computer.
'Cause IBM feared that they might lose out on the market
if it took any longer than that.
So the usual IBM way of doing things
had to go out the window.
This new machine would be built using entirely
off the shelf components and software.
For example, IBM picked Intel's 8088 processor
as the core of their new machine.
For an operating system they selected Microsoft's Dos.
After failing to come to arrangements with digital research
to purchase CPM for the machine.
The only part that was uniquely IBM's was the BIOS,
the basic input output system.
The BIOS was the basic firmware to IBM's new machine,
and was responsible for booting in the operating systems,
and to act as the glue logic
between hardware and software.
- [Commercial Narrator] The very first computers
seemed as big as houses.
And so mysterious that for most of us
the computer was behind a closed door.
But IBM was thinking how to make the computer more useful.
And as one good idea led to another,
it began getting smaller, faster,
less expensive and easier to use.
Today, a new IBM computer has reached a personal scale.
A person can afford it.
A person can put it anywhere.
Office, home, or school.
And a person can learn to use it with ease.
IBM made its personal computer
to help a person be more productive.
To help a person be more creative.
And those are good reasons for a person to feel good.
The IBM personal computer,
now at selected stores across the country.
- [Narrator] IBM released their new machine
on the 12th of August, 1981,
I don't think I'm giving away any spoilers here
when I reveal that it was a success.
Dealers loved IBM's new machine,
especially the expandability of it via the isa-bus,
which meant soon that lots of third party manufacturers
were making hardware cards for the new machine.
The similarities between MS Dos and CPM
made porting applications in the CBM operating system
pretty easy.
Meaning that many of CPM's most popular applications
were soon available for the IBM PC
and new applications written explicitly for the PC
was soon starting to displace those.
The IBM business PC also offered graphics
something that CPM previously couldn't do
in a portable way.
This meant the native applications for the PC
started to make use of graphics.
So for example, Lotus 123,
a platform with most popular spreadsheet,
offered bar charts.
I mean, look at this guy, look how smug he is.
He's thinking to himself, oh, bar charts, hmmmm.
The IBM PC soon started
to dominate the personal business computer market,
they had pulled it off.
Many in the industry thought IBM would never get a PC to market
with one industry analyst quoted as saying,
"IBM bringing out a personal computer
"would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance."
Well that dude was wrong.
Things were now all rosy in the IBM garden,
and new potential computing space
was now firmly where IBM wanted it.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile somewhere in Texas, Rod Canion,
Jim Harris, and Bill Murto
had all quit their jobs at Texas Instruments
to found a new startup called Compaq.
Leaving a well-paid, secured job
to found a new company
can be considered brave at the best of times,
but these guys must have had balls of brass
because their plan was to buy an IBM PC,
reverse engineer it and start making their own.
This could be considered the corporate equivalent
of finding the biggest, angriest bear in the woods,
saying unpleasant things about its mum,
and booting it straight in the nuts
whilst yelling "come on then,
"have a go if you think you're hard enough."
IBM were not known for taking the warm and fluffy
approach with competitors,
and what with Compaq having just parked its tanks
on IBM's front lawn,
they are ready and waiting for IBM's lawyers
to come a calling.
- Search this place.
We shall find our BIOS code just like we did
when we searched Eagle Computers.
- But we legitimately reverse engineered it,
we didn't copy it.
And this is starting to chaff.
I can't help thinking that choking a subject
is poor questioning technique.
- We shall find our code
for we are the IBM legal department.
Tear these offices apart,
find our BIOS source code.
- My name is Rod Canion, and I am the president of Compaq
Computer Corporation of Houston.
A mysterious company you have been invited to come
and hear about today.
This is an important day for us.
A public introduction of a new personal computer
that has been in development for nine months.
And I thank you for being here to share it with us.
I'll take a few minutes to explain the product
and the company,
then we'd like to demonstrate the features
that we feel make the product unique.
The company is Compaq Computer Corporation
and the product is the Compaq portable computer.
And we're pleased to have you here today
to be among the first to see
that the ideal has indeed been achieved.
It is now my pleasure
to show you the Compaq portable computer
which we believe is a milestone
in the personal computer field.
- [Narrator] In order to not get their asses
sued off completely,
Compaq had come up with a cunning strategy
to avoid being sued by IBM for the copyright violation.
What they'd done is they'd split
their development team into two.
One team was to look at the IBM PC,
see what its BIOS did and write a specification for it.
The second team's job was to write the BIOS code
based on the specification developed by the first team.
That way, they produced their code
without ever having actually seen IBM's code.
By the end of January 1982, the portable was on sale.
And sell it did.
In its first year of sales, Compaq sold over 53000 PCs,
which made for a sales total
of over $111 million,
that made them the first ever startup to hit
over the 100 million mark that fast.
- [Commercial Narrator] It's portable.
- Portable, yes but Mr. Prince says big computers do more.
- [Commercial Narrator] Compaq plus does everything
yours does and more.
- Yes, but Mr. Prince says big computers store more.
- [Commercial Narrator] Compaq plus stores
30 times more than yours.
- Does it have a handle?
- [Commercial Narrator] Yes.
- Oh drat!
- [Commercial Narrator] Compaq plus,
it simply works better.
- [Office Worker] Mr. Prince,
something terrible's happened!
- [Narrator] So let's get a look at this thing.
The one you see in front of me if my Compaq portable.
I bought off someone I knew about six months ago.
It's cosmetically fine,
but definitely not working.
The first thing you probably noticed
is that it doesn't look very portable by modern standards.
Weighing in at a portly 22 pounds,
it's not exactly light.
In fact carrying it for more than about 10 minutes
really does result in quite a sore shoulder.
Yes, that is the voice of personal experience talking.
The portable really isn't that far off being essentially
desktop with a handle.
Its frame, by and large, is made of metal
with a plastic coating,
and it's got a couple of isa slots,
just like the original IBM desktop machine.
It does of course has a built in CRT monitor,
which is available in green, green, and green.
As you can tell, Compaq didn't exactly set a priority
on color graphics.
But at the time, business users would have been used
to using green screen monitors.
Users of modern PCs might well be surprised
to discover that this thing
actually doesn't have a hard drive,
just two floppy drives.
One to boot Dos off and the other one to run
an application off.
But again, this would not have been too surprising
to users of the time.
Now let's talk about getting my one repaired.
It's most significant fault
was that one of the power rails to the isa-bus
had unfortunately blown.
So at some point an isa card had drawn way too much power,
unfortunately this meant that the supply rail to the bus
essentially acted as the fuse wire.
So this meant there's a burnt out track on the board
that I had to remove and replace.
Unfortunately I did all that work before I thought,
hey let's make a video on this for YouTube.
So, there's absolutely nothing to show you there,
I'm afraid.
If we zoomed in on the PCB,
you'd just see a PCB that looks very much the same
as it did when it was first made
'cause, you know, I fixed it.
Yeah it doesn't make for a great video,
that part, does it?
So we'll move on to the keyboard.
Pretty much every keyboard in every Compaq portable
is dead by now.
The reason for this is under every key,
there's a little spongy pad
that's flexible plastic on the one side
and tin foil on the other.
Unfortunately the foam material decays over time,
it just becomes like a sticky residue,
which means pretty much every keyboard dies.
But hey, it's not like Compaq were thinking,
hmmm people might want to use this
and make a video on it on something called the internet
in 30 years time.
So perhaps they can be forgiven
for their choice of materials.
So let's get our keyboard repaired then.
First thing we've got to do is unscrew the case.
While it's only got six screws, we'll speed the footage up
a little bit so you don't have to wait.
Now the case is off,
we'll unplug the cable.
Next we have to unmount the PCB from the case,
that's just held in by a few little screws.
There we go, there's the keyboard's main PCB.
Now we have to unscrew the keys from the PCB itself
and oh my god, did this take so long.
There are so many screws.
I mean the thing's basically made to screw.
I sped this footage up by 600%
and it still feels like it was dragging.
But eventually the ungodly quantity of screws
were defeated and finally we had access to the PCB,
and the little sponge pads that live underneath each key.
Now what doesn't show it well on the camera,
is the sheer amount of dead spongy crap
that feel out the bottom of this thing
when we opened it up.
There was a surprisingly large amount of hoovering
that needed doing once this was completed.
Now we'll have to lever a sponge pad out from underneath
each one of these keys.
Now as you can see, the process of removing them,
kind of destroys them.
The sponge that bonds the two halves together
basically just collapses as you're taking it out.
Now there's a heck of a lot of these,
so I'll speed up the footage a little bit
and truncate it somewhat to stop you all from getting bored.
Assuming you're not dying of shock
to discover that it took ages to get these little things out
and they pinged off absolutely everywhere,
leaving bits of key just scattered around my kitchen.
But I did eventually manage to remove all of them,
which as you can see,
just leaves a white plastic clip behind,
ready for a new one to go into.
While we got it open,
we'll also give the PCB a bit of a wipe
with an alcohol rub,
help clean off any dirt.
Now we're gonna have to fit some replacement pads.
Luckily for us, there's a company called TexElec
in the States that still makes these things.
They're a husband and wife team
and they also make up a number of eight bite iso cards,
which we've also bought a few of as well
for this thing.
To be honest, I'm not exactly the best
at fitting these things,
however, I managed to do a good enough job
that the keys actually work on the end of this thing.
Of course, we now have to screw the stupid keyboard
back together, oh god, all those screws again.
(moaning)
Now I'm into retro computing as much as the next person,
assuming the next person is really into retro computing,
but I must admit, even I draw the line
at trying to boot a PC off five and a half floppy disks.
So we're gonna install an eight bit ISO IDE controller
and a compact flash card
so we have something to boot off and store all our games on.
Now time for the moment of truth.
We'll switch this thing on, see if it works,
or if we have a difficult to explain house fire.
And the good news is, it actually works.
And after a small while,
boots itself into MS Dos.
Which means we can now look at some games.
Oh.
Now here we have the MS Dos version of Ms. Pac-Man,
and you can tell it's Ms. Pac-Man
because there's a little green bow in her little green hair
on the little green ball.
Now in some ways you might think a green CRT monitor
does not lend itself overly well to gaming,
and in some respects, you'd be right.
But you haven't seen this thing in color.
CGA graphics are not exactly the nicest pallet.
I'll grab a little bit of footage in the moment
of this being played on an emulator
so you can see what it'd be like in CGA's default color set.
You'll also note the sound is not great.
At this point, PCs basically just have a bleeper speaker.
That's why it's bleeping away like that
'cause that's all it can do.
There is just one bleeper speaker,
that's musically your lot.
No, okay, home computers at the time
didn't exactly all have the best sound.
I mean, this is not the only machine
that just had the bleeper speaker.
The Spectrum was the same.
But a lot of home computers
did have some form of sound chip,
so it could manage to make a little bit
more sophisticated than the odd bleep or bloop.
But these were built as business machines,
not home gaming machines.
So, it wasn't exactly a priority for them.
Next we'll move on to the MS Dos port,
of Sega's classic Zaxxon.
This must have been ported to almost every platform
back in the 80s,
and to be honest, this is not a bad port of it.
It holds up pretty well to the C64 version,
and on a green screen, doesn't look too bad.
Now let's have a look at the classic that is Tetris.
For those of you that thought
this was a Game Boy exclusive,
where were you in the 1980s?
Yes it was released for practically every platform
including MS Dos.
This particular version
is terminate and stay resident version.
Oh.
What that means is
that you load it and it sits in the background
inactive and you can mess around with Dos,
and then for a key combination,
launch Tetris any time you like and then exit it again.
Its clever nature however doesn't stop me sucking at it.
Now if you're thinking that sounds
like a bit of a novelty, you'd be right.
There were a lot of novelty versions of Tetris.
The Amiga even had one that was there purely
for copying floppy discs
and giving you a game of Tetris whilst it did it.
Now, just as proof to show
that software kept getting developed for CGA and older PCs,
we have a game that most people associate
with the Amiga, Lemmings.
Yes it did not take long for Lemmings
to get a PC port,
which was at least fairly shortly after the Amiga original.
And supported most of the graphics formats
at the time, CGA, the original color graphics adapter,
EGA, Tandy graphics, and the modern VGA.
Unfortunately it takes quite a while
to load on older machines.
But load eventually it does.
I want to treat you to the familiar Lemmings menu screen.
Although in this case it's particularly green.
Now I'd love to show you footage of me playing Lemmings,
but there's one small problem,
Lemmings needs a mouse.
And what I don't have for this machine is a mouse.
Or more importantly,
what I don't have is the 25 pin to nine pin
serial port adapter that would allow me to use
the old serial mouse I do have kicking around.
But this creates a great opportunity
for me to play a game playing using an emulator
so you can see what color CGA graphics look like.
Okay, shields your eyes, everybody.
Now if you've not seen CGA before,
you'll be forgiven for thinking
why the hell did the developers choose those colors,
I mean, ew.
But the developers had no choice.
These were the fixed four colors
that CGA came with.
Those of you familiar with CGA
are thinking, well could sort of do more than that,
via composite, it worked by putting two of the four colors
next to each other,
and because composite video would bleed one color
into the other,
they'd sort of mix and you'd get a third color from them.
The thing is though, at the time,
most people didn't have a composite monitor
linked up to their CGA card for gaming,
so most games didn't make that much use of it.
But I do think it's pretty good
that new MS Dos games supported much older hardware.
It's not like shipped a special version for old machines,
just the default floppy came with a version
that worked on old graphics hardware
and newer graphics hardware.
Admittedly the box art showed the shiniest version
of the graphics done in VGA,
even though it said that the minimum spec was CGA.
But if I was the game's publisher,
I wouldn't wanna put my CGA artwork on the box
for fear of putting off either the customers
or inducing seizures in passersby.
For those of you who are still awake
and have made it all the way to the end of this video,
I feel like I've probably trespassed on your time enough.
So I'll just quickly say thank you for watching
and if you enjoyed it, subscribe.
I might make more of these things.
If you hated it,
destroy my sense of self-worth in the comment section below.
Or alternatively you can comment
and tell us what your first PC was.