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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

Notable exception: Compaq

Arguably, HPE has more of a Compaq legacy than HP legacy. Much of their x86 server line has a Compaq lineage.

My rule of thumb for buying laptops (since the mid 2000s) has been that compaq is the bottom-rung cheap brand that should always be avoided. Not sure their survival has been a good thing.

The consumer gear was trash. The server lines were an entirely different story. Also worth noting that by the mid 2000s, Compaq was just a branding on the consumer side. The hardware was all the same old HP consumer junk.

The server line was a legacy from Digital, especially the Alpha line. It was a shame when HP killed it to go with Itanium.

Itanium is why we can't have nice things. (Wishes SGI would have never tried)

In 2006, every single one of my coworkers bought a brand-new MacBook, and within a month every single one of my coworkers had a MacBook in the shop.

I bought a Compaq laptop with a 64-bit CPU for under $1000. It ran flawlessly for over a decade, needing only a new battery. I eventually gave it to my parents who still have it.

Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at Compaq.

Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the best.

Sounds like Apple's current laptop strategy.

True, Compaq started to go down-market and that did dent their reputation.

HP had already been racing to the bottom for years, though.

Counterpoint: my Compaq Presario 1210 survived for about 20 years before it finally stopped POSTing. Even the original hard drive still worked (albeit with a range of bad sectors around which I had to partition).

The HP Compaq merger as well as the Agilent spin-off in many ways marked the transition from an engineering company to a bunch of vacuum cleaner salespersons.

PS: Yes it's unfair to blame all this on Compaq, probably more a result of increasingly expensive semiconductor R&D.

Ouch! I've worked for hp since 1999 just about when we spun out Agilent and it was definitely a painful cultural transition to a consumer business.

However, on the more profitable inkjet side of the business we've been doing a lot of R&D and I don't think we've sold a single vacuum cleaner.

Compaq is what ruined HP after they ruined themselves by going from a quality-focused builder to pulling parts out of the seconds and thirds bins to cut costs in the early-mid 90s. They absorbed DEC and ruined it then proceeded to infect HP (with Carly's help) with that culture. Not that HP was blameless either. I was done with HP when we received a $10k LH3 Netserver in '99 or '00 with both of its CPUs dangling inside the chassis from their fan cables. If my memory is right, they'd outsourced most of their building to Ingram Micro by that point.

That was years ago. The HP that exists today is certain a place things go to die. I'm not sure what HP does these days but like IBM it keeps tugging along on its brand name without dying.

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