3 May
2004
3 May
'04
4:09 p.m.
On Mon, 3 May 2004 19:00:01 -0500 (CDT)
Dave Dunfield <dave04a(a)dunfield.com> wrote:
I'm pretty sure the Compaq Portable III that I sold in February was an 8088 machine.
Orange plasma display, small lunchbox configuration, etc. I just went back to the
sales-photos for it and indeed it was badged a III. It had the standard 640K of RAM and
no expansion slots. Did they possibly make this machine with different processor
configurations? Is it possible yours has a 3rd party processor upgrade? I definitely
didn't have to run a Setup program to get it going and it had sat idle for a long time
before I powered it up, so I'm fairly certain the one I had didn't have a setup
battery or CMOS setup storage.
I think the
first one was the Portable (8088 w/ 256k, then the Portable
II (smaller but still 8088 and 640K) then the Portable 286 (286 CPU and
640k(?)), then the Portable III (the small lunchbox sized computer (I don't
remember if theese were 286s or 386SXs)) and then the Portable 386 (it had
a full fledged 386DX). FWIW I have a P-II sitting about five feet from me.
FWIW, the Portable III is a 286 machine. I have pictures of mine posted on
my site if anyone wants to see one.
If anyone has the original setup disk for the Portable III, I would love to
get an image of it - the "generic" AT setup disks work in that you can
configure
the drives and get it to boot, however Compaq apparently "rolled their own"
checksum algorithm, as once configured with any of the generic disks, it gets a
CMOS Checksum error.