Tech Time Warp of the Week: Watch John Cleese Compare a Compaq to a Dead Fish

Today, Compaq is little more than a memory, an extra brand-name slapped on the odd machine sold by aging computer giant HP. But there was a time when Compaq was big—so big it could hire John Cleese to compare its computers to a dead fish.

The year was 1986. As Apple hawked the original Macintosh, Compaq was among the myriad companies selling what were then called IBM-compatible PCs. This meant it offered machines that paled in comparison to the Macintosh—and weren’t all that different from systems sold by the likes of IBM, Dell, and Gateway. But GUI-less PCs were big business in those days—much bigger than the Mac—and for a while, Compaq set itself apart by offering a line of portable PCs and, yes, paying Monty Python alum John Cleese to pitch this office-centric hardware.

In the ad above, you can see Cleese extolling the virtues of a machine called the Compaq Portable II. Though it doesn’t include a battery and isn’t all that portable, Cleese says the Portable II is “such a marvelous machine that it would be quite unfair to compare it with another computer.” So he compares it to the enormous fish sitting on the table in front of him.

Like the fish, the Compaq Portable II weighs about 22 pounds, but there are differences. Whereas the computer includes 4.1 megabytes of memory, Cleese points out, the fish can’t remember a thing. “Hardly surprising,” he says, “because it’s stone dead.”

The bit is really quite funny, particularly for an 80s computer commercial. And there many more where it came from. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can relive about 20 Cleese-Compaq spots, and each one flaunts that wonderfully ironic and self-referential breed of humor pioneered by Cleese and the rest of the Pythons—or at least something close to it.

In one ad, Cleese says you shouldn’t be watching the ad and “changes the channel” to some men dancing in lederhosen:

In another, he says he shouldn’t have spent all that time pitching the Compaq Portable II and proceeds to kick the thing off the table. “I should have been telling you about Compaq’s Deskpro computer,” he says. “The point of buying a Deskpro is that it’s so heavy no one can tell you to take it home”:

Twelve years after HP bought Compaq, we don’t miss it that much. But we miss the Cleese ads. And in the always-connected age, we love to idea of a machine that’s so heavy no one can tell you to take home.