Compaq began as a placemat sketch in a pie shop and outsold IBM.
Three Texas Instruments managers, each with $1,000, drew a portable computer that could run IBM’s software. To copy it legally, their engineers rewrote IBM’s code without ever looking at it. In its first year Compaq sold $111 million of computers, an American record, and by 1994 it had passed IBM.
Compaq on Brandseum