Any guesses as to the failure?

[alank2]

It is green and it has a long persistence as well!

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

It is green and it has a long persistence as well!

Wow, awesome, that's cool! The longest persistence I've ever seen was that of the original IBM PC green monitors, those with the cast metal enclosures that weighted tons, more than a second perhaps two or almost, it was amazing.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Compaq used a red-orange plasma display for the Portable III. Some laptops also had those.

Those were amazing too!

[james_s]

I used to have one of these, I kind of wish I'd kept it, I even had the matching padded carry bag for it.

They have a 9" green CRT monitor that uses CGA scan rates and appears as a CGA monitor to the system. It was quite nice as I recall, very crisp picture.

[SeanB]

I forsee a Schaffner input filter change will be a future thing, they will go bang after no power being applied to them for a few years.

[alank2]

I forsee a Schaffner input filter change will be a future thing, they will go bang after no power being applied to them for a few years.

Wow, you guys are impressive.  Yes, this happened.  It began to make some fizzle noises for a day or so and I wondered if it was just a loose connection or something.  Last night = loud fizzle and quite a burnt smell!!!  It does seem to keep working though after that event, at least it is usable.

[james_s]

If you have trouble finding a bootable disk I can make you one, I still have one XT in my vintage computer collection. Sounds like you might have one on the way already but thought I'd offer in case you don't.

My Compaq Portable had a 10MB hard drive in it and that worked fine, although the power supplies in those machines were known to be marginal. I think if I had one now I'd install an XT IDE interface and small SSD or a Microdrive in a CF to IDE adapter.

[alank2]

Thanks James - I appreciate it.  A friend of mine actually had a 5.25" box of old disks and one of them was DOS 3.30!  Once I had that I was able to create new disks and used fastlynx to move files across to create the other disks I needed!  I ordered one of the XTIDE kits with a 128MB disk on module to plug onto it!

[PA0PBZ]

On topic (I guess): I just watched "Silicon Cowboys" on Netflix, recommended if you are interested in the rise (and fall?) of Compaq.