Tallest Tower in the Land (not a mac)

[firebottle]

The system has a highly advanced BIOS that is configured using a set of 4 floppies.

LOL, yes, so "advanced" because of the EISA slots it needed a bunch of disks to configure it.

Then there's all the non-standard oddities and quirks Compaq included in their BIOS and hardware at that time. I remember some DOS software that worked fine on a generic PC would choke on a Compaq.

If I recall, you had to waste 8 to 10 megabytes of space on your hard drive for the special "config" partition.

If you couldn't find the exact disks for the exact model, including the extra EISA files for whatever third-party cards you were using, you were S.O.L.

And then compound that with, as you mentioned, dead batteries.

IBM had the same deal with their MCA card slots on their PS/2 series.

Thank goodness the industry invented PCI slots.

The one thing Compaq did right was the cases. Best build quality of any corporate PC save the IBM PS/2 server series.

 

[CelGen]

IBM had the same deal with their MCA card slots on their PS/2 series.

At least the reference floppies are easy to find. After HP assimilated with Compaq all hell broke loose.

 

[krye]

Doesn't look as tall as the Dual Xeon rig I had 10-12 years ago. The case had 6 drive bays and enough room to mount 2 power supplies. It was tall!