Hi John,

>I still have some Compaq desktops from the early 2000s

Yep memories of quality hardware!

I stopped using Compaq machines long, long ago. But i remember quite well my first "CompaqDeskpro 386", a legendary piece of US engineering! I remember the "technical director" (quite a large shop in the defunct telecom industry!) asking me why the hell I needed such a massive 2 or 3 MIPS "number-crunching power". This 1950-60ies techies could not get why anyone would "need millions of instructions per seconds" :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Deskpro_386

His large engineering teams had Sun machines. But he thought an IBM PC was fast enough for us in admin activities. He lost his appeal to "top management" (CEO!) on this. He could not prevent me having this machine... And I got my mythical compaq 386, a myth à la Corvette! This "beast" served us quite well. And it was robust hardware!

Souvenirs, souvenirs, as we say in French...

Daniel