The IBM-compatible and portable Compaq wins Richard King's commendation

It seems a long time since the Compaq was first announced, but finally it's here. The product is one of the highly-imitable 'sewing-machine' variety of 'portable' micros, and in this case, a particularly well-finished example of the breed.

The Compaq has been so well-covered in the press that it hardly bears repeating but it's "IBM-compatible". "IBM compatibility" is a term often stretched out of all recognition by the publicity people but as far as I can tell the Compaq is truly compatible.

Though the machine itself is well-made, it's obvious that as much, or even more, care was expended on the documentation. Frankly, the machine-specific part is among the best I've ever seen. The operations manual is in the form of an A5 three-ring binder in a slip-case, which is divided into twelve sections by stiff separators with indexing-tabs.

The first part is called 'Getting Acquainted'... a very good place to start. Opening the machine, setting it up and booting are explained step-by-step, DOS operations come next, covering most aspects and though there is a tendency to repetition in this section, this isn't a bad thing.

Basic, how to terminate a session, user diagnostics, and options are also covered, and the back is filled up with four appendices: a summary of DOS commands, notes on compatibility, a glossary, and the index plus some user-response cards.

Appendix B details the main differences between Compaq and IBM. Principally, the Compaq's Basic is completely disk-based, whereas the PC has part in ROM. The PC can have up to four drives, and the Compaq only two, but the graphics are built-in, none of which should affect the ordinary user.

There are two other manuals which come with the Compaq: one is the MSDOS 2.0 reference and the other is the Basic 2.0 guide. These are, apart from the outer covers, pretty standard. Dull, not always as clear as they might be, but complete for all that.

I don't know whether the engineer who designed the Compaq has some experience in aircraft-design, but I strongly suspect so. Certainly the insides bear a very close resemblance to the bits you're occasionally privileged to see when your flight can't leave because the aeroplane won't go.

When it's folded up, the Compaq looks just like a sewing-machine with a rather expensive handle. The case appears to be reasonably tough, but I don't think it's quite tough enought to go in the baggage-hold - though it should fit under your seat anyway.

Unfolding it involves turning it on one side to slip the catches on the keyboard, revealing a small monochrome screen on the left, and two 5.25" drives mounted vertically on the other side, each of which can store a respectable 360K. In use, this is effectively the equivalent of some 60,000 words of text... enough for all but the very largest files.

It has a pair of little legs which flip out from the bottom to give a (very mild) incline to the main unit, and a similar pair on the keyboard.

At each side is a sliding hatch. Behind one is the power-socket and switch with space to hold the card and a British plug, and behind the other are the various I/O connections. You are enjoined to keep both open whenever the machine is in use, since that's where the fan exhausts.

Behind the right-hand panel are various I/O connectors, plus blanked-out positions for several more. Those provided include a parallel printer port suitable for driving a printer (Centronics standard), and three video outputs. These aren't just extra connectors, but provide three different signal-types... RGB for connection to a high-resolution colour monitor, as well as composite video and TV signals.

More intimate access to the machine is through the top panel, which can be enticed off by judicious use of a narrow-bladed screwdriver.

It became quite obvious, at this point, that the machine is not user-serviceable, and any maintenance or upgrading is to be carried out by trained personnel.

The chassis certainly looks and feels solid enough to take any reasonable - or moderately unreasonable - amount of handling.

The machine runs the 8088 pseudo-16-bit processor and 265K or RAM, but I can't say whether there are any fancy chips or ULAs in there, nor whether there is any provision for such enhancements as the 8087 maths-processor. The documentation doesn't help as there aren't any circuit diagrams nor proper specifications included, though since the machine is aimed at people who are not expected to have an interest in this area, this isn't surprising.

The machine is expandable, and as mentioned above, the natural addition is some form of communications facility, and since this requires only a few chips, the remainder of the space could be taken up with memory. An ideal candidate for this would be one of the multi-function cards so often purchased by PC-owners, such as the Six-Shooter from Qubie, which has one parallel and one serial port, gives memory-expansion in 64K blocks from 64K to 384K (the latter taking the machine up to the maximum possible of 640K), as well as a clock-calendar. Other companies also offer similar boards, and thanks to the 'ultra-compatibility' of the Compaq, you can be sure that they will work exactly as intended.

The keyboard isn't an exact duplicate of the IBM keyboard, but having ten programmable function keys on the left-hand side, a normal qwerty layout in the centre, and a numeric keypad coupled with cursor controls on the right, it's pretty close, and unless you have the two side-by-side, it's hard to spot any differences.

It's claimed that the feel is better, without the clicky feel of the IBM keyboard but I don't think it matters much. The keyboard on the Compaq is as good as most, with no glaring bad habits except a very strong elastic property in the coiled cable.

The built-in screen is 9" across the diagonal, larger than some other luggables, displays 80 columns of 25 lines, is good and sharp and has a green phosphor with a fairly long persistence which leads to some interesting ghosting effects in the demos which come on the master disk. These caused me some problem, since they suggested that some highly original smooth-scrolling full-screen editor was available, as well as windowing.

The demos, which are very impressive, suggest various uses for the machine, one of which is writing. To show this off, a small two-stanza 'poem' is constructed on the screen, chopped up, rearranged by neat diagonal moves and edited, changing it from two lines of prose to two stanzas of about eight lines, centre-justified.

Don't be misled, as I was, into thinking that this is available to you... it isn't. It's just a very sophisticated demo to illustrate the point, not a real editor. I wish it were, though.

Among the other screen-based features of the machine are high-resolution graphics and programmable characters, and these too are well demonstrated. In fact, it's possible to produce some quite fancy gaming-pieces.

From the style of the operations manual, it's evident that this machine is aimed at the non-technical user, so how well does it satisfy those needs?

In this instance the hardware is relatively unimportant. It conforms closely enough to the IBM standards to accept virtually any hardware or software for the real thing, and provided the disks go round reliably and the screen displays the expected results, all is well.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of different or not so different programs are available, ranging from programming languages, accounting suites, filers, editors, as well as more entertaining ones like the Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it's the machine's ability to cope with this particular program, which requries the presence of some quite minor features only found on IBM PCs and close relations, which proves that the claim of almost total compatibility is perfectly justified.

So you can be quite confident that any program which you've seen demonstrated on an IBM will operate quite happily on the Compaq. In general, of course, you'll be using less demanding programs such as Wordstar or either of the Easy Writers for an editor, Lotus 1-2-3 or a selection of Visi-progs for spreadsheet and graph-drawing, dBase II for filing, and so on.

The Compaq is as tough and well-made a machine as I've seen for some time, and it's obvious that the company has made considerable efforts. The price is reasonable, and it's a good useable machine, at a price wihch should make it a very serious competitor to the PC Portable, or even the PC itself, particularly since it's almost exactly the same thing.

When it comes down to it, the acid test of an IBM compatible to its ability to run IBM software and, to a lesser extent, to accept IBM peripherals. On top of this you have to consider factors like ease of use and price.

The Compaq comes through the first test with flying colours. It happily ran the software PCN's real IBM runs, and spat on the Wordstar disk PCN's IBM spits on. It will accommodate one of the widest ranges of IBM software and hardware of any of the PC clones.

As far as actually using it is concerned, the attraction seems to be less one of transportability than of compactness. To get it up and running, all you do is snap open the catches holding the keyboard/base onto the fascia, pull out the legs on the keyboard and the main console, then slide back the hatches that cover the power input and the interfaces.

Overall it's pleasant to use, salient differences being that the review machine's drives made a slight clunk clunk noise (drive a) and a whinging noise (drive b). This is marginally less disturbing than the characteristic gronk gronk of the IBM PC's drives. The speaker is slightly louder than the PC's and the keyboard considerably springier. I wasn't too keen on this last feature, and it might have been better to change the keyboard layout, although this really depends on how used you are to the standard IBM keyboard.

Under normal office lighting conditions the screen is excellent, but the high definition has been achieved at a cost. If you use it in dim ambient light, you'll encounter particularly bad ghosting problems and will be forced to train a light onto it.

Is it worth the money? The answer is a qualified yes. The price of IBM-style machines is high, but given than any one of them is worth the money, the Compaq is certainly in with a very loud shout.

John Lettice