Masa's Journal: Vintage hardware

Aah... there is nothing so lovely than the smell of a vintage hardware... Except, the fine smell of a new hardware, of course.

Last night I was having a dinner with my friends and got an old Compaq Contura 430C laptop. The machine is really old. It's an i486 with 32 MB RAM and 700 MB hard drive. The laptop includes some weird pcmcia network card, but fortunately Linux recognizes it as a NE2000 card. So, now I have an old laptop in my hands waiting to get a Linux installed. The real problem will be an X11 installation, because these old Compaqs have some strange Western Digital graphics chip, which will be erroneously detected as a Cirrus Logic chip.

The whole point having an old-timer laptop up an running as a secondary workstation (the battery is dead, so I'm dependent on electric wall socket) is that it is a great feeling to turn a piece of worthless junk to useful piece of hardware.