Still, beyond the questionable timing-why would HP chief executive Carly Fiorina double down when the personal computer industry is shedding more red ink than a splatter film?-there’s a more subtle story in this shotgun marriage of two unique corporate giants: a tale of fading cultures and difficult transformations in this most Protean of industries.

Fiorina, the marketing whiz from Lucent who assumed the helm of HP two years ago, had already performed some surgery on the fabled HP culture. For decades, the company was a touchstone in Silicon Valley, an engineer’s paradise where well-crafted products-built by nerds, bought by those who appreciated nerds-found stable markets. HP was literally the original high-tech garage startup and the Stanford-educated founders built the business in a traditional, almost paternalistic fashion (as exemplified by their famous mission statement, “The HP Way”). This conservatism wasn’t always beneficial-in the mid-1970s, when a junior engineer named Steve Wozniak showed his bosses the plans for a newfangled thing called a personal computer, they balked, and Woz left to cofound Apple Computer.

Still, HP eventually “got” the consumer market, at first through its excellent printer division, then by finally building a big PC business of its own. When Fiorina arrived, she swept out a lot of the old guard, particularly when she divested the original scientific instruments division. (At the same time, she tried to trade in on the garage start-up myth in corporate branding ads.) She recognized that in the 21st century, big bucks would not come by selling chip-stuffed boxes but by marketing services that kept the boxes and their networks running efficiently. That impulse was behind her ill-fated attempt to buy the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting firm last year.

Compaq’s history reflected the giddy period when PCs were busting out. Two engineers in a Houston pie restaurant used a napkin to sketch out a portable computer (in 1982 “portable” meant that you could lift it without a crane) that was compatible with the IBM PC. The free-wheeling Texan company was known for high-quality “clones,” and marked a paradigm shift itself in 1998 by snapping up Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)-the once-mighty standard bearer of the “minicomputer” that had fallen on hard times. In the Internet Age, Compaq had been itself struggling but had been making noises of following Apple’s lead in producing more innovative computers and devices. (This was born of necessity, since Compaq could not match the deftness of Dell computers in selling bland boxes direct to customers.) It, too, had been in hot pursuit of the new tech goddess, services. Now, like DEC before it, it’s just a big fat rat, ready to be swallowed and digested by the boa that bought it.

If the buyout gets past the antitrust enforcers, we can expect a further watering down of both cultures. From a consumer point of view, there will be fewer choices. And a single research and development unit is less likely to produce the same number of innovations that a pair of idea labs might turn out. The burning question, of course, is how successful the new Compaq-ted HP will be. The sad fact is that computer companies below IBM in the food chain have not historically managed to adjust to the sudden sea changes of the digital revolution. (IBM, with its critical mass and entrenched credibility in the corporate market, was almost itself a casualty, before it learned how to exploit the Internet while still leveraging its assets.) That’s why you see computer companies coming out of nowhere to rise dramatically- like Compaq did, and later, Dell-at least until they get too big or too smug to remake themselves in accordance to the Next Big Thing.

Maybe HP’s desperate bet on Compaq will indeed allow it to become an invincible second banana, an IBM Jr. that may one day challenge the king. But it’s just as likely that the company that in 2025 holds the No. 2 slot in computing is currently being mapped out in a pie house, inside a garage or in a chat space on the Net. And maybe on its way to glory, this as yet unborn entity will make one-day headlines by snapping up a faded HP.