A few months ago I rescued a box of stuff from my mothers house. It was mostly things that I left in my room when I moved out many many years ago. One item was a Compaq Contura laptop. It didn’t have a power cord but today I found one that worked in my basement.
Surprise! It boots! Into Windows 95!
It had an amazing 45mb of free disk space and a rockin 640×480 screen.
The trackball doesn’t quite work, but I was able to navigate around with the keyboard. Windows explorer reveled a curious folder called “Linux”. Hmmmmm. Shutdown to DOS, cd \linux, Linux.bat, and some version of Linux is now loading. Wild!
There’s no password for the root account so I’m in without issue.
I think I mostly used this for icq and irc while watching TV. That means I must have a PCMCIA Ethernet card somewhere for this. No ssh client or server installed, so we just have to do with iPhone pictures for now.
uname says we’re on kernel 2.2.6. /proc/cpuinfo says we have a 486 with almost 20 bogomips (a Kindle fire is about 100x that for comparison).
No Vim, but vi brings up a familiar looking screen, but wait! It’s Elvis 2.1!
