Userlandia is a series about all facets of technology and computing, past and present. Retro tech, computer history, modern tech policy, and the lighter side of computing are some of the subjects tackled here.
Nostalgia? Yeah, I'm full of that, but more for the comics of the 1970s that I grew up with. Still, I did my share of computer noodling. I liked the slim design of the Compaq Prolinea. The later Pentium beige boxes were so plain, but as you noted, a plain box could be hiding almost anything under the case. I had been struggling with a used Commodore 64 in the early 90s. It mostly worked, but every now and then it would just glitch, and I'd have to give it a rest for a while before using it again. My first PC compatible came in '94, a Packard Bell 486 with a 33 mhz processor. It came with DOS 6.2 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11, a bit of an improvement on the regular Windows 3.1, but no sound card, although I quickly added one. Anyway, as the 90s wore on, and even in the early 2000s, I loved working with used 486s, and I did pick up one of those Compaq Prolineas, among other computers. There was actually a store that opened up temporarily, I can't remember exactly when, late 90s, I think, and they had a bunch of used computers, mostly Compaq 486s, both desktop and laptop. I messed around with used Pentiums, too, but they never seemed as interesting or as much fun as the 486s were.
Great video and great topic! I had bought my first 386DX/33 pc in 1989, when Windows/386 was current. One thing I remember very well about these 1990s Windows 3.x machines is how many people would sit through an excruciatingly long boot because the pre-installed MS-Dos 5 system did not load smartdrv with the best settings by default, nor did it automatically load the XMS and EMM memory managers. Windows would load first, then Windows would execute the memory management and disc caching for you. By manually editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files in MS-Dos to load these utilities before the system does anything else, and especially by enabling write caching in smartdrv, you could shave minutes off the time it took to boot into Windows.
in europe compaq was big player in the early 90s laptop market, I don't think they even sold any PCs or at least they did not succeed selling any PCs in Europe. Packard bell and gateway did not exist at all in here ever at all.. only packard bell I've ever seen was a rebranded asus laptop. As for the PCs, self assembly or builds made by the store have always been and are still the most common option. Every international, big store chain and a local boutique offers PC build by their employees with a huge markup, using some parts they had hart time selling off but probably still much better deal than some HP or Dell premade PCs that only big corporations buy.
I particularly enjoyed the retrospective of your experiences with the ProLinea. My parents brought home a new Presario 633 from a local dealer in early 1994. The 633 was essentially a ProLinea 4/33s with some vertical front vents, and 4MB RAM soldered to the motherboard with 4 empty slots. It came with a different software package, notably TabWorks replaced Program Manager as default in Windows 3.1. My Commodore 64 remained as something for me to tinker with, with the Compaq serving family computer duty until late 1998. When it was replaced, it became my hardware and software playground. Like you, I bought used sound cards, CD-ROM drives, and other peripherals from local computer shops. My very first eBay purchase was a used Kingston Turbochip 133 somewhere around 2000. Somehow, I've managed to hang on to the Presario all these years, and still fool around with it now and then. I recently got a minimal Linux system with the latest mainline kernel to boot on it! (486 and ISA support isn't dead yet)
I think what I've enjoyed the most about comments like yours is learning that my experience with these machines is shared by many more people. It's like being in a secret club that's so secret we don't realize we're members.
Our paths are very similar! Christmas of 1996 is when dad bought me my first computer out of the newspaper classifieds. It was an IBM PS/2 model 30! with a 2400baud hayesmodem. Back then I was in the 513 area code, and it had Telix too! My favorite BBS at that time, was Forest Park BBS. Unfortunately, it appears that one was never archived but i remember it being on a BBS list which is how i found it to begin with. I ended up catching a virus shortly afterwords from downloading all the games on those BBSes and killed the PC. Couldn't really fix it as the disk drive quit reading my disks. Dad bought a 386 and thats when our first experience of the internet came into play 14.4K modem on Windows 3.1 with AOL 3.0. Not a pleasureable experience but it was my first nonetheless... Then in the summer of 97 dad finally broke down and bought a new machine. a 200Mhz CTX. We are only about 3 years apart, as I was 11 in 1997. also, not to nitpick too much but your IBM PS/2 stock footage, you have some serious leaky caps going on with the FDD and HDD and it needs attention, to be expected.
Yes, the drives were recapped shortly after this was filmed. One of those "Well, it's working for now, best to do it after I'm guaranteed to have the footage."
A great video! You should have, like, 10 times as many subscribers as you do. I think we're about the same age -- I graduated high school in 2002. My elementary school had Apple IIs in every classroom, plus a computer lab with probably 25 or 30 of them, mostly the IIe. I remember using Logo to draw shapes in first and second grade. Around 1993 or so, they replaced them with Macs, and I got an LC III at home. I've stayed a loyal Mac user ever since. Macs were in every computer lab for most of my education, except for high school, when someone at my college prep private school had the bright idea to replace the Macs with cheap eMachines, which quickly got filled with garbage and stopped working.
Of course, that's why I said "most." Cache and VLB were less common (and more expensive) on 386 PCs; the 486 era brought these features to more affordable price points.
I used to have a compaq pc like this,,, i actually managed to add a cd rom drive to it... made installing windows much easier than swapping out 26 1.44mb floppy discs🙃
This was before Compaq went to crap... the ProLinea's werent bad. I had quite a few ProLiant's at work. My f-i-l's first PC about that time frame was a Packard-Bell, God help us all. I had an old AT at home until my wife's grandfather bought me a Compaq Allin1. Nice little machine.. portable enough. Compaq pissed me off by not providing me with a SoftPaq I needed to install a DVD drive because I didnt come with the PC and from that point on I swore off Compaq. BTW: I'm bitter as hell at Carl Ichan. Cost me a great job. Thanks for the episode, brought back some happy memories and cleared a few things up. (ISA vs. EISA).
The IIgs _should_ have been Apple's future. The Mac was very expensive, only B&W, was 0% compatible with existing Apple software, and had no expandability. The IIgs was the obvious better choice at the time. Steve Jobs knew this and forced the company to underclock the processor so that it would underperform the Macs. Apple actively asked developers to *not* develop native IIgs software. Back in the day, I spoke with the lead developer at a software firm about their _missing_ IIgs software. He told me that Apple wouldn't "let them" develop software for the Mac if they made IIgs software. I don't know how that was enforced, but I remember the conversation, and it was clear that they had to choose, and they chose the Mac.
I love the IIGS, but if Apple kept their wagon hitched to a 6502 derivative they would have went out of business. "Steve Jobs knew this and forced the company to underclock the processor so that it would underperform the Macs." This is false, for numerous reasons. That's not to say that Apple didn't hold the IIGS back in other ways (like not marketing it or pricing it too high or not revising it later in life) but the CPU reason is a myth. I actually have an upcoming hour-long video explaining _why_ this is false, though actually assembling video content that will keep people's attention for an hour is much more difficult than doing the writing and research. :P "Back in the day, I spoke with the lead developer at a software firm about their missing IIgs software. He told me that Apple wouldn't "let them" develop software for the Mac if they made IIgs software. I don't know how that was enforced, but I remember the conversation, and it was clear that they had to choose, and they chose the Mac." I highly doubt this. There's no way Apple would've been able to enforce it. Maybe Apple wouldn't have given them preferential treatment with a bundle deal, catalog listings, or something else, but nothing was stopping them from publishing the software or buying the developer kits.
I still have my Compaq Prolinea 4/33s bought for a £1! not long after buying a Pentium3 pc and getting access to the Internet and Ebay! The Compaq then was upgraded to a dx2-66 with soundblaster AWE64 and cd-rom for playing DOS/win3.1 games and DOOM😁. Also got another Compaq pc, a Deskpro upgraded to 233mmx and Voodoo2 3d card for Pentium era games and win95.
I really wanted one of these back in the day, but instead I got a Dell PDA with Windows Mobile and saved up for a Compact Flash GPS Card and map software. After seeing this demo, I made the wrong choice. PalmOS was definitely so much better than the Windows Mobile experience of 2003.
I had that same soundcard with CD-ROM drive, also had the Encarta CD's and I still have my Zip drives... somewhere. Although, mine is for the parallel port and I also have a PATA version for 250Mb disks! That must have been around when I was 10 orso in 1995!
I really appreciate this video. I used two C64 machines up until 1991. Still have them too. The company I worked for used Compaq machines during most of the 90s. I’m an HP guy now and have been since the early 2000s, but I will always have memories of the Compaq Presario machines. Wish I had access to these vintage computer magazines as well.
Many of the magazines I use for sources have been scanned and are available on the Internet Archive, Google Books, and other digital libraries. Sure is easier to thumb through dead tree versions, though. Didn't think I'd ever regret tossing my 1994-2002 backlog of PC/Computing, but here we are...
On the only-C64 until 1997 memory… We had the same thing - 8088 DOS clone until 1999. The teachers were sometimes confused when I printed my papers from the thinner paper and dot matrix printing…
I had the "pleasure" of working for that scumbag Welch. Took years off my life... .. That being thank you for the trip back to 1993 when I was in high school and wanting a 486 so badly!
I never in my life have bought a pre-built PC, pretty much all of them are kind of a "Ship of Theseus" starting from a 386DX50 way way back when to this day. As for Compaq - when I had an office job in a corporate they were totally brilliant, very compact, also totally engineered for easy service. Every screw had a nice plastic thumb spinner and also retained so you can't lose them. All the major stuff like HDD's, RAM, CPU, GPU all easily clipped out without needing a screwdriver. The corporate PC's did cost more for sure. This was in the day when repairing stuff was a legitimate ordinary thing, but now we have "green" trash it all and buy a new one and no service is allowed by manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, etc.
When I first started fixing computers I quickly came to hate Compaq machines for the fact that most of their computers had customised motherboards and power supplies making finding parts an absolute nightmare. People tried to sell me on how good HP and Dell PC's were and then I found that they were almost exactly the same once you opened up the case. This design scheme is one horrible trend that filtered down to so many off-the-shelf PC's to the point that I have only owned PC's that I built myself ever since because I can't trust manufacturers to use standard parts (and until window panels became a thing it's not like shops would let you look inside before buying).
i was at MS in 1990's (IT) ..about every 6 months we were receiving 44 foot trailer full of PC's i remember very clearly one of those trailers had ProLinea 4/33 they were pretty cool since they took up so little desk space..internally at MS the ProLinea were 3rd computers on most of the developers desks..then of course 6 months later another trailer full of Gateways or Dells or latest model of Compaqs etc would replace those ProLineas..One internal (MS employees only) conference i attended on campus given by Compaq i believe it was in 1993 or so ..and the Compaq rep asked "Does anyone know Compaqs Mission Statement is for next year?" ...Silence.. he responded "STAY IN BUSINESS".. NOTE: all these computers were sent to MS from Manufactures at no cost to MS..
Very nice piece of personal (in the sense of your own) computing story. Those were wild times, to be sure, and to deal with the crazy fast obsolescence cycle of that time took a humungous amount of money. Using an early 90s PC in the late 90s was like having to make do with a 15 year-old computer today: yes, you can use it, BUT...
I still have an identical Compaq ProLinea4/33 that received a DX2/66 somewhat later. Still the best-looking machines made, in my opinion, and exuded business-like quality, not a machine for beginners. I was already in my 30's at the time, but had a blast upgrading, building and buying new machines. An AST was my first machine, pulled off a big stack of boxes at Circuit City. So pleased!! Thanks for the memories.
I started out with a TRS-80, it received many rebuilds and upgrades. Colour graphics started to be the thing so I bought a VIC20, however the 22 characters per line and near zero gap between lines made it quite painful to use - for writing code that is as even simple lines of code wrapped around like stupid, so it received little love. After a kind of side step with an NEC APC3 (lovely high res colour graphics) I then headed into '286 PC land. The only time I then saw anything brand name wise was when I got a job at a telco and scored the odd offcast, one of them being a super slim Compaq 386sx box, probably the 'baby bear' referred to in the Compaq marketing. I never really used it as it was so far behind the curve when I got it, I instead set it up for the parents with a family tree program installed trying to encourage them to enter some of their family history, but that never washed, it hit the bin. Now I kind of regret that as it would make a nice entry into my retro computing piles. I never took any notice of the 'Presario' and 'Prolinea' etc. badges, to me the was just internal marketing BS, I just referred to them as Compaq's then subdivided them by their processors etc. i.e Compaq 386 etc.
Still have my original (secondhand) IBM XT that my Uncle gave to me in high school next to my desk. It's been a while since I booted it up, but it's still working, albeit a bit more on the creaky side, 30something years later. Sadly, I recycled my college system, a locally produced 486 DX/2 50, that I got sometime during my senior year of HS. Lots of memories on both.
What a brilliant bit of history….. history I remember I remember as a kid getting my first home computer a ZX81 and I remember the paper round to bye the ram pack just to play a game that took half an hour to load in from a tape recorder and then came my first real computer a BBC basic running dos. Hours reading computer magazines to type the programs that were hidden in the pages and then came windows 3.1 and thing’s worked easier windows 95 came and went 97 arrived and everyone went looking for the oldwin file hidden deep inside that self contained os. What fun I had what happy days
Thanks for the blast from the past. By the time the ProLinea hit the market, I’d already moved to custom builds. I kept my Compaq 1.2 5 1/4 floppy drive and Sony CPD1320 monitor.
In 1992 I put a pawn shop computer on layaway. Very small weekly payments. It was a Tandy 486 DX (or SX?), a whole 25mhz. It had a CD drive (not X2 or anything) and a 100MB hdd with some bad sectors with Windows 3.11. I had to buy and install a new modem (33.5mpbs), sound card and RAM (all the way to a whopping 28 MB, a very odd number, right?). Sure I had to delete games to play other games but I really liked that PC. I might be wrong on the specifics but it was a long time ago.
It was really wild. PCs got obsolete in less than half the time they do today, being quite more expensive on top of that. It was very exciting for the computer magazine reader, and pretty terrible in every other respect, at least from today's perspective.
I never much cared for Compaq's Prolinea line, and I absolutely despised Presario. I was (and still am) an IT professional, and I regarded these as brand dilution. To me, Compaq stood for high-performance, achieved with high-end, high-reliability components and no compromises, i.e., the Deskpro. From my first encounter with a Compaq Deskpro 386, used by my boss at my first job, I aspired to the day I would eventually own one, but since those things cost as much as a fairly nice new car at the time, that day was far off. The compromises in the Prolinea were obvious to me, with construction that looked cheesy and lack of EISA slots and high-end components. The "pro" in Deskpro screamed Professional, while the "pro" in Prolinea was just a bastardization of the word (and I really wish companies would stop abusing it already!). Presario was even worse, as pretty much every Presario I ever encountered looked cheap and was underpowered, but at least they dropped all pretenses of being for "pros". Then HP finished the job of trashing the entire Compaq brand by essentially turning it into their low end. By that time, I could've afforded any Compaq model I wanted, but, of course, I no longer wanted one. Just my two cents, as someone who lived through those times. Unlike the Prolinea, though, your story is inspiring. I'm really sorry that your family had to go through the pain of a job loss like that, but the way you all picked up the pieces and forged ahead is American as apple pie, and you showed true dedication and creativity in upgrading that lowly Prolinea, keeping it relevant until 2002. That's what makes it special. It wasn't just any Prolinea; it was YOUR Prolinea. Hopefully, it got re-homed to someone else who really needed a computer but couldn't afford a new one, and appreciated how well you had kept it.
You're a commenter of taste who appreciates well-constructed devices. I have to wonder if Compaq would have survived without pivoting to the lower-end market. The same open standards they championed reduced their market to a commodity, which meant the DeskPro's days were numbered. Dell was able to juggle their consumer and business markets, but maybe it's a matter of perception-Dell did make quality products but their onsite service was really what sold them to businesses. As much as I rag on Dell, if I was still in a purchasing role I would probably still use them for my fleet and back office machines.
Awesome video. Such a good era to live through. My family computer was a C64 to and while, I only used it occasionally after upgrading to my own C128, C64C, Amiga and then Gateway 486 (4SX25), The C64 continued as the workhorse until about 1997/1998, a 14 year run. That is when my Dad finally upgraded it and his business invoicing to a Compaq Presario 166Mhz. So this video very much strikes a home cord with me... Thanks and keep up the good work.
I think every computer has its charm, from the most bland Dell Optiplex where there’s millions like it, or unique ones like the G4 Cube and high end custom PCs.
I remember using one of these in the late 90s as my first router - it ran Linux from a floppy, would auto-dial my ISP when it detected outbound traffic and even acted as a print server for my old HP laser.
