The house of Pies Napkin Story- how the laptop (sort of) Began

In 1981, three Texas engineers — Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto — quietly slipped away from their stable careers at Texas Instruments. They weren’t rebels… yet. They were just three guys who knew computers and felt something brewing in the industry. Personal computers were still bulky creatures — more “honorary piece of furniture” than “grab-and-go convenience.”

They met at The House of Pies in Houston, a 24-hour diner known for coffee strong enough to wake the dead and pie sweet enough to give them something to live for.

Over plates of pie and that legendary diner caffeine, they started dreaming out loud:

What if computers didn’t have to be chained to a desk?

What if you could take a computer anywhere?

And right there, between the strawberry-rhubarb and the pecan slices, Rod Canion grabbed a napkin.

Not a legal pad.

Not a whiteboard.

A napkin — the universal symbol for “this idea might be crazy, but hear me out.”

On it, he sketched a computer with a handle. Something you could carry like a briefcase. Something that could run the same software as an IBM PC — which was unheard of at the time because IBM guarded its hardware compatibility like a dragon sitting on a hoard of BASIC code.

That napkin sketch became the blueprint for a company they would form just months later:

Compaq Computer Corporation.

Compaq didn’t invent the laptop outright,

but they did invent something just as disruptive:

➡️ The first IBM-compatible portable computer.

The Compaq Portable hit the market in 1983.

It weighed 28 pounds — basically a sewing machine that ran MS-DOS —

but the business world went wild.

It was:

portable,
powerful,
and perfectly compatible with IBM’s software.

Compaq sold $111 million in their first year.

By year four, they hit $1 billion, the fastest-growing company in U.S. business history at the time.

And that little napkin?

It represents one of the most famous “startup in a diner over coffee” moments in tech history — rivaled only by the Hewlett-Packard garage and the “let’s drop out of college and create Apple” conversation.

The Lesson in All This

World-changing ideas rarely announce themselves with fireworks.

Sometimes, they look like: