This page covers only the proprietary BIOS developed by Compaq. Other types of BIOSes used by Compaq computers are not covered in this page.
Compaq was one of the earliest developers of BIOS, developing the first instance of their own BIOS firmware in 1983 for the Compaq Portable personal computer. This was less than a year before the release of PhoenixBIOS, which was the first commercially available BIOS firmware developed by Phoenix Technologies. Despite this, alongside the availability of other commercial solutions such as AMIBIOS by American Megatrends (now AMI Inc.) and AwardBIOS by Award Software, Compaq continued developing their own BIOS for many years until their acquisition by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2002. After the acquisition, HP continued developing and using this BIOS for a couple more years (specifically for the HP-Compaq series of computers), until discontinuing it in favor of commercial BIOS solutions and shortly after, UEFI-based ones (mostly AMI Aptio).