Hello everyone, it’s Erik. This post isn’t related to any company news, but it does have to do with computer repair/restoration as a personal hobby of mine. I plan to create a separate blog page on here where posts like these will be published, but until that’s up and running, I’ll be sharing these types of posts here.
Last Sunday, I visited the System Source Computer Museum located in Hunt Valley, MD. They have over 5,000 exhibits on display, with a significant portion of them being fully operational. They host a variety of vintage computer related events, including swap meets, conferences, and, most important to this post, repair workshops. It was at the latter where I brought in a Compaq Portable III, with the intent to finally restore it to as close to factory condition as possible.
This was actually the second Compaq Portable III in my possession. I bought both from the museum at different times, and ended up giving the first one back to them because, despite the efforts of both myself and another attendee, we couldn’t figure out why the system wouldn’t power on. The second one, on the other hand, booted perfectly fine, and it even came with a 3½ floppy drive instead of a 5¼ drive, making it easier to transfer files. Neither, however, were in great shape. On pretty much every Portable III (and Portable 386) out there, the coiled cable that connects the keyboard to the rest of the PC has begun disintegrating to some extent. On both of the machines that were in my possession, it was getting worse each time the cable was moved. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that the cable was going to have to be replaced, since I didn’t want to have to clean cable crumbs every time I moved the unit. In addition, both had a CMOS battery that was dead. While nowadays, this means you just swap the battery out for another CR2032 and edit the settings in the UEFI setup utility, it wasn’t as easy back then. The Portable IIIs used one of two clock battery modules that were attached directly to the motherboard, with the battery itself being encased in plastic (or ceramic, depending on the module used). This meant I’d have to find an aftermarket replacement module. And if/when you replaced the module, you couldn’t just load a built-in setup menu. You’d have to insert and boot from a Compaq specific setup/diagnostics floppy disk, which would save the settings to the CMOS. Finally, I wasn’t even sure if the hard drive was still operational. Even if it was, I would be worried about when it would fail, so I figured the best thing to do would be to swap it out for some form of flash memory.
Fortunately, I was able to source replacement parts to address all of these issues, and over the course of five or so hours at the workshop, I was able to restore the keyboard cable, replace the battery, and swap the hard drive out with an IDE to CF adapter. While my original plan was to livestream this to one of my Instagram accounts, I found out that I now need 1,000 followers to do so. My next plan was to stream to YouTube from my phone, but I need 50 subscribers for that. So instead, I recorded the restoration and uploaded it to my YouTube channel, which has been dormant since August of 2019 or so.
So without further ado, here is the full, uncut restoration video.
I do plan on uploading a follow-up video before I travel to Japan, but that’ll be wholly dependent on how busy I am. In that video, I’ll be talking more about the machine itself, rather than the restoration. With that said, I hope you enjoy seeing what goes into restoring a “portable” computer from 1987!