One of many wonderful commercials John Cleese did for Compaq Computer Corporation in the mid to late '80s. A very rare find and a treasure for any John Cleese fan, these classic ads were shown only in Great Britian.
It would probably fit on it if this were the original digital video. The noise and scan lines probably contribute quite a bit to the size, so some modest compression would get it on in a heartbeat.
Oh, but it can. It's just going to need a little bit of tweaking that is. In fact, you could fit this whole commercial to a 1.44mb floppy to a rather decent 320x240 quality with colors reduced to 256colors. Though in this case, I believe this computer barely scrapes 16colors so that would make the file even smaller.
Only the latest model of Portable 2 could get that high, and that with all the maximum after market upgrades. "Released in 1986 at a price of US$3499, the Portable II was much improved upon its predecessors. It included an 8 MHz processor, and was lighter and smaller than the Compaq Portable. There were four models of the Compaq Portable II. The basic Model 1 shipped one 5.25" floppy drive and 256kB of RAM.[3] The Model 2 added a second 5.25" floppy drive and sold for $3599.[3] The Model 3 shipped with a 10MB hard disk in addition to one 5.25" floppy drive and 640kB of RAM for $4799 at launch.[2][3] The Model 4 would upgrade the Model 3 with a 20MB hard drive and sold for $4999" Keep in mind those were mid 80s dollars. Double all those prices to get what that cost would be today. You'd be paying over $10,000 for a computer with 4 meg of RAM. Affordable consumer computers with that much memory wouldn't be around until about the early to mid 90s.
If this is the Compaq Portable 2, I wanna see what the Compaq Portable 1 looks like. I'm envisioning a Big Rig Truck Trailer with a keyboard taped to the side.
I have used this. The great thing about ye olde dos was that you didn't have to wait for the computer to boot up; press the right buttons and just start inputting your data - the computer would eventually catch up with you! Great muscle builder as well. What modern computers can do both?
Twenty two pounds? That's my desktop... "So, if you're looking for a powerful portable computer that doesn't smell, we suggest you buy Compaq portable two."
4.1 MB? My processor has twice that in just L3 cache! I'm not even including L1 or L2, much less the memory. It's amazing how far we've gone in such a relatively short time.
And look at how far we've come in the 11 years since this comment was posted. This Cleese commercial could become a time machine where every now and then we interact with decades old comments about how much progress has been made
@@antigonemcdermott4514 Yep! Now I have an AMD 5800X3D with 96MB of L3 cache! Let's see where we're at in another decade or so! ...AI will probably take over...
I wonder what marketing team were thinking. "So, we need an ad for this computer, any ideas? -What if... -Yes? -...What if we compare it to a large fish? -??? -A fish. -That's marvelous! Good job you're promoted"
My favourite was another version of this video, used in internal meetings that compared the UK MD, Joe McNally with a fish.............Classic. Rest assured that the fish won out!!
"I suppose it could give you a mega bite." *Laughs histerically* I preffer the part where he laughs at IBM's computers software running at 1:20. "Ha ha ha". It's almost like that Nelson kid from the Simpsons "Ha ha! *points finger*"
Oh, man I remember the radio station I worked at years ago had two of these... On a separate note, it also reminds me of the Advertising guy (at the station) who used it too... ...man, he was a high-strung, jittery kind-of-guy... Not because of the computer - just jittery.
Actually, the "odd" Microsoft bytes are mathematically the "right" ones, as the one gigabyte, is just two to the power of ten, originating from the fact that computer systems use binom system (1000101110110...). So, the "gigabyte" is a unit wich is just represented in a different form of numbering system, in this case, powers of ten. The bot are correct, but in a matter of fact, the binom is used in memory, and, as also a marketing trick, the 10^ byte is used in harddrives...
Correction; because it wouldn't OFFICIALLY run any proprietary IBM software. It's not really a technical issue; in the business world, a computer does what it's promised to do. Nothing more, nothing less. If it was some happy geek (like me :P), he wouldn't care about what it was supposed to do, he would care about what it actually did. In this case your point would be perfectly valid, but I don't really think geeks where one of the primary target markets for the Portable II anyway.
@craniumkid22 Thank you! I absolutely detest reading through the comments, but figured someone else didn't have their Beltone on while listening and surely must have asked the same thing.
Technically, yes actually, if you emulate everything. You would need a really big HDD (both for the game itself and the emulated RAM) attached to the serial port through another, modern computer. Would literally take years to render the main menu, take a picture with your phone, upload to flicker and get called an idiot. Most of the time would be spent on rendering and flaming though.
4.1 MB of memory? That must be a mistake. It was an XT-compatible, limited to 640K. They must have been referring to the optional hard-disk. That's right, optional. Back then, most people loaded their software off a floppy into memory. If you needed to save something, you put in a separate data floppy. I actually used one of these Compaq luggables a couple times. A friend's dad used one for work, and let us play some games on it.
Well, in a good way, they don't make portable computers the way they used to. But it is true that quite a few of these "luggables" didn't have any hard drives, and required the use of floppies. I would assume that the Portable 2 was very advanced for its time.
@MattTheSaiyan Yeah. As a colectors item it might be worth something lol. Wow. Sad thing is that I remember when 4.1MB was alot and 386 was the top of the line... Yeah, I'm old :-(
If you were to make the same advert today, I wonder what animal John Cleese would have to compare to a 1TB quad core i7 processor, 16GB ram computer/netbook. You'd probably have to invent one out of thin air!
