The World's Ugliest Gadgets

by Joshua Fruhlinger — May 22nd 2007 at 12:22PM

Compaq Portable 1

Back when portable meant small enough to fit in the back seat, this PC Clone, the Compaq Portable 1, got Compaq off the ground with brisk sales and an inexplicable popularity while simultaneously kicking off the computer industry's obsession with beige plastic. These things were everywhere, probably due to the built-in screen and presumably quick setup. The green screen is hot, though.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

XSpider1 said 1:52PM on 8-13-2008

Yep. It's too bad that youth is wasted on the young. I was fixing those old "luggables" back in the day and, at that time, they were the $ht! Don't get "sick" every time you see something that looks archaic or that you don't understand, kids. Try to remember that what we have today is an evolution of what we had then and that our modern devices would not have been possible without their predecessors. There's beauty in that. One day (sooner than you think) the world will look back on your iPhone and have a good laugh. Good, old technology will never be sickening.

Elanna said 1:58PM on 8-13-2008

Hey people looks can be deciving!

MP649 said 9:25PM on 8-22-2008

talk about ugly

fred said 8:28PM on 5-24-2007

Laugh now Geek heads. Back in 1984 this luggable ran WordPerfect,Dbase III and other programs, still had plenty of space for storgage with it 10 megabyte harddrive. You often were the only one in the office with a computer besides the CFO. You couldn't go down the street with out being stopped and asked questions about it as you hauled it on your foldable luggage cart. Remember they knew how to write code then.

Michael said 9:00PM on 5-24-2007

Ahh, my first computer; I think I paid $100 for it (used), and it came with a 9-pin dot matrix printer and a nearly full box of paper. I wrote many a paper on one of these babies in college. I even used it on the job for parts inventories, service and production records. I used it for almost two years, then upgraded to a "real" computer with a whopping 4M clock (16 on "turbo", holy fireball Batman!) 1M of RAM and an incredibly huge 40M HD. I couldn't begin to imagine what I'd do with all that disk space. Man, if that baby was on my desk right now I'd have a, a...well, I'd have a really big paperweight I think. It's amazing how quickly the WOW factor turns into nostalgic ho-hum.

Chris said 9:08PM on 5-24-2007

Ah, I had one of those. It was an 'upgrade' from my TRS-80 model 3. I think it may still be around somewhere in my parent's attic or something. I didn't like the small green letters on the screen. I did find the TRS-80 a few years back sitting in their shed and it still booted up. I wrote a program to create random numbers, but all of a sudden smoke started rolling out of the top of the computer. lol. Good days.

C said 9:30PM on 5-24-2007

I still have one of these stored away somewhere in my home. A piece of me misses it.

bayoubill said 10:49PM on 5-24-2007

The smartass punks who think this is ugly don't have a proper appreciation for paleo-gizmos from which evolved the fancy-ass electronic sh*t their pathetic lives depend on.

In the words of my friend, the immortal philosopher Elmo G.: "Fah' km!"

Jane said 11:41PM on 5-24-2007

I have one in my attic. It still works. It has good old 1-2-3 on it.

Mrtrixx said 12:22AM on 5-25-2007

I had one of these, got it at a pawn shop, was my 2nd computer and frankly I loved it, weighed in at only 2 tons and one day while carring it upstairs the handle broke it rolled down the stairs, jumped and stuck in the wall!(Dry wall) I pulled it out, plugged it in and it worked perfectly fine. if I dropped my current lap top, well.. gotta get a new laptop then.. NOTE: get this, I had the game SPIDERMAN for this computer, never beat it though. it was a wicked computer til the powersource went out and could not find replacement at the time. ($100.00 computer totally worth it)

Michael said 12:24AM on 5-25-2007

Right on Bayou Bill. All the people pretty much summed up exactly what I had on my mind to say. Back in the day, so to speak, this little honey was the most beautiful thing you ever saw.

Payday said 1:07AM on 5-25-2007

My 1st babymomma had one and I thought it was the coolest thing. At the time.

asalamalickem said 5:07AM on 5-25-2007

Who sold these things? Sears and Roebuck?

JULIE said 5:14AM on 5-25-2007

WOW HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED...ITS PRODUCTS LIKE THESE THAT HELPED MAKE WHAT WE HAVE TODAY.

Bond, James said 6:25AM on 5-25-2007

I see most of our dear readers here are at least 1,000,000 years old. Thank god I was invented after that garbage was lmao! It's ugly and disgusting, I feel sick.

Bill said 2:38PM on 7-17-2007

Bond,James is a ridiculous jerk. He says he's glad he was invented after all this "garbage". Hey, skidmark. It's just too bad for the decent people of the world that you had to be invented at all. The Compaq suitcase computer wasn't ugly. At the time it would run software that IBM's wouldn't. When the first IBM portable computer was announced at a press conference a reporter got up and asked if the IBM was COMPAQ compatible. Get real, people. Times do change but it all has to start somewhere.

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