First generation The LTE and LTE/286, released on October 16, 1989, The LTE was the first notebook on the market with conventional 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, as well as the first with optional hard disk drives. Compaq sourced their floppy drives from
Citizen Watch and their hard drives from
Conner Peripherals. Despite the drive's platters measuring 3.5 inches in diameter, as had been typical of
desktop computers since the late 1980s, the drive's casing measured thick—much thinner than the desktop drives of its day. This allowed Compaq to fit a spinning hard drive within the confines of the notebook-sized computer. The LTE sports an
80C86 clocked at 9.54 MHz, while the LTE/286 is based on the
80C286 clocked at 12 MHz. Both are respectively
CMOS versions of Intel's 8086 and 80286 processors, intended for low-power applications such as battery-powered portable computers. The Compaq LTE and LTE/286 were primarily manufactured by Compaq at their Houston campus. Compaq later signed a contract with Citizen to allow the latter to manufacture models of the LTE and LTE/286 for distribution in certain territories. In October 1990 the company unveiled the LTE/386s, featuring the
Intel 386SX processor clocked at 20 MHz. The stock memory was bumped up to 2 MB, expandable to 10 MB, with the same proprietary RAM cards as its predecessor; the number of card slots was increased to two for the LTE/386s. The LTE/386s also replaced the stubbly display panel of the older models with a full-sized, 9-inch-diagonal LCD capable of displaying
VGA graphics in sixteen shades of gray, in a return to form from the SLT.
LTE Lite The LTE Lite, released in January 1992, improved the battery life and quality of its predecessors' LCD panels while reducing weight. The LTE Lite/20 and LTE Lite/25 introduced
suspend and
hibernation modes, as well as a
BIOS password and a
Kensington slot for added security. Starting with the LTE Lite/25C and LTE Lite/25E, a
trackball was built into the display housing on the right side, with the left- and right-click buttons on the reverse side of the housing. The LTE Lite/20 and LTE Lite/25 used Intel's low-powered, portable-specific
80386SL processor. The LTE Lite 4/25, announced in November 1992, was the first laptop to feature Intel's later portable-specific
i486SL. Manufacturing of the LTE Lites was initially performed at Compaq's plant in Houston, Texas. As with the preceding LTEs, Compaq used Citizen Watch of Japan as manufacturer for its monochrome passive-matrix LCDs and as a
second source for manufacturing of the entire systems. Citizen later became its sole manufacturer. Meanwhile, Compaq purchased the monochrome -matrix panels used in the Lite/25E and Lite 4/25E from
Hosiden. Production of the LTE Lite was again moved from Citizen in Japan to Compaq's overseas plant in
Singapore in 1994—Compaq citing wanting to fill vacant production lines in that plant, which also manufactured its
Contura line of budget notebooks.
LTE Elite The LTE Elite series, released in March 1994, was Compaq's first product with slots for
PC Cards (known contemporaneously as PCMCIA cards, after the
association who founded the card standard). Unlike other vendor's implementation of PC Cards, the LTE Elite's was largely
plug and play, allowing cards to be removed and new cards to be inserted without rebooting the machine. Compaq worked closely with
Microsoft to develop the necessary support drivers for plug-and-play PC Cards in
Windows 3.1 and the forthcoming
Windows 95. Another new feature of the LTE Elite was the ability of its processors to be upgraded and replaced, owing to its use of a
socket rather than a soldered-on
surface-mount package typical of laptops in the mid-1990s. The LTE Elite retained the built-in trackball of the LTE Lite. The LTE Elite series was manufactured in large part in Compaq's facility in Singapore. Certain surface-mount PCBs were manufactured in Compaq's factory in
Erskine, while final assembly of each LTE Elite was completed in
Houston. The LTE Elite line was plagued with manufacturing issues and technical faults, leading to several recalls. These factors and more contributed to a proportional shrinkage in Compaq's laptop market share, despite the company's total PC market share slightly increasing from 1993. In 1994, Toshiba overtook Compaq as the top manufacturer of laptops in the United States, helped along with their
Satellite line of laptops.
LTE 5000 series The LTE 5000 series, released in September 1995, was a top-to-bottom redesign. The last in the LTE line, the LTE 5000 series was the debut of
Intel's multimedia-oriented
Pentium processor in a Compaq laptop. It was also Compaq's first laptop with built-in 16-bit audio synthesis and playback (beyond the
PC speaker);
hardware acceleration for video; and an
infrared port for communicating with
PDAs. An optional
MPEG decoder card also allowed the laptop to stream MPEG video in real-time as well as output video to television sets and projectors. In its stead was what Compaq termed the
MultiBay: a multipurpose,
hot-swappable expansion slot in the front of the machine that allowed users to slot in a floppy drive, a
CD-ROM drive (a first for the LTE line), a second hard drive for more disk storage, or a second battery for frequent travelers. Compaq also offered a full-feature docking station that added several other MultiBay units to the machine, on top of additional PC Cards and an
Ethernet port. The LTE 5000 series also abandoned the monitor-mounted trackballs of older models in favor of an implementation of IBM's keyboard-mounted
pointing stick technology. Because of the disappointing performance of the LTE Elite, Compaq hired
Inventec of
Taiwan to co-design and manufacture in full the LTE 5000 series. The partnership not only hastened development of a successor but also gained Compaq access to Taiwan's more cutting-edge technologies in the field of mobile computer production. ==Docking stations==