Memories of a Compaq Contura

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.