The Compaq Revolution: An American Success Story

On a foggy San Francisco night in 1982, an engineer from Texas with a four-page business plan met with young tech star Bill Gates in the back room of an old mansion. Their meeting held the seeds of the 1980s' PC revolution and information explosion to follow. Rod Canion was there to ask Gates for a new kind of software, software that would enable applications to run on more than one brand of computer. It was a new, untried, idea. Gates was hesitant.

Canion€s company, Compaq, did make that idea work. It took off like a rocket, shattering business records and inventing technology concepts still at work today. But it was invading the territory of the most powerful computer company in history, IBM. And IBM had no intention of upstarts from Texas or anywhere else disrupting one of its markets.

The Compaq Revolution is the story of a tiny startup that became one of America€s great success stories, gaining strength each time it dodged one of IBM€s silver bullets, until it led a revolt that defeated the most formidable competitor imaginable. A defeat that in the end drove IBM from the market it had helped create and propelled Compaq to global market leadership.