It was the summer of 2005. During the
summer break from the university, I spent most of June, July and August in my old hometown, working
at my uncle's place. He owns a small plot of forested land,
and it
had been ravaged by a storm that past winter. Most of the toppled
trees had already been stripped of their branches, so the only
thing that remained was to haul the logs onto the trailer that was hooked up to an old 1950s
tractor, then drive them to the sawing station, haul them off the trailer and onto the sawing rack, cut
them up into boards, then stack the boards so that they could dry without getting warped. My uncle
has a severe chronic back injury since quite a few years back, so most of the manual labor was up to
me. I really enjoyed the work, putting my back into it until my muscles ached, soaked in sweat,
inhaling the smell of freshly cut lumber with every deep breath. We'd take long lunch breaks at my
grandparents' place, wolfing down generous servings of my grandmother's delicious cooking.
Afterwards, I'd make some coffee and relax in the worn leather couch. A couple of hours was just
enough to recover from a morning of hard work.
The question was: what to do with those
daily hours of rest? I slept well at night back in those days, so no need to nap. Naturally, I
decided to undertake yet another time-consuming and ultimately
pointless computer project. I didn't have much money to spend, but I
managed to find a cheap old
laptop at an online auction site. It was
a Compaq Contura 430C from 1995. The amount I paid for it was
roughly
equal to the cost of having the machine shipped to me, a
total of around 300 SEK (about $40 at the
time) if I recall
correctly. It was surprisingly heavy, but pretty compact in terms of
size. The
screen was tiny, with a maximum resolution of 640x480. The
Contura 430C had a 100Mhz 486DX
processor. To most people, that
means nothing. To me, it brought back nostalgic memories of my old
33Mhz 486SX, my very first computer. Back in those days, I dreamed of
a 486DX4 processor, but
couldn't afford such luxuries, or even find
one. In addition to that powerhouse of a processor, the
Contura had
8MB of RAM and a 540 MB hard drive. My machine came equipped with a
worn-out battery and
a floppy disk drive, with Windows 95 installed.
I remembered Windows 95 very well from my youth and
wasn't very
interested in reliving those particular memories: flashbacks of blue
screens, crashes
and lag.
 |
| Compaq Contura 430C. Image courtesy of Tim Holtan (www.tholt.com/comptop.html). |
So, I decided to put Linux on the
Contura. By then, I had a fair bit of experience with Fedora Core (as it was called back then) and
FreeSCO. Eventually, after a bit of research, I downloaded an old version of Slackware and began the
painstaking procedure of installing it using floppy disks. The old 1.44 MB disks were pretty and I
miss the feeling of one snapping in place in its drive, but they were also a major pain when you had
software spread out on a dozen or more disks. Inevitably, one disk, probably one of the last three or
so, would suffer a hardware failure of some sort, spewing out corrupt data. Naturally, this
happened to me. Growing up with an underpowered 486 had prepared
me
well, I knew that persistence was the only solution. After a few
hours, I had Slackware up and
running on the Contura. Since the
hardware of the machine was so limited, I skipped the GUI
altogether, relying solely on a command-line console.
Once I had a basic system up and
running, I started to experiment and tinker with all sorts of things, from MySQL databases to typing
up text documents in Vim. It was a powerful testament to the
flexibility of Linux and the hidden potential of an old discarded
laptop. As soon as I had eaten my
lunch, I'd immediately immerse
myself in that laptop and stay glued to the screen until my uncle decided it was time to get back to
work. When the summer was over, I brought the Contura with me to
Lund. I spent a few weeks staying at a friend's place, sleeping on
his couch. The Contura was the perfect companion, enabling me to
tinker with Linux even while living out of my backpack. Shortly thereafter, I moved into a dorm and
found myself absorbed in this brand new world and the people in
it.
The Contura spent more and more time gathering dust. Eventually, it
ended up in my basement storage. At some point, probably a few
moves later, I threw it away.
Today I regret that decision. I wish I
still had that machine, just to look at it, touch its
keyboard, boot
it up and hear that humble BIOS beep after completing its RAM check.
Like my dear
grandparents, it's nothing more than a memory now.
Unlike them, it's something I could have kept at
my side for as long
as I wanted. It could have been a physical link to those summer days
of years past, but it got lost somehow, like all
those phone calls I never got around to and all those postcards I never sent. I'll never
forget it.
