Old Notebook Teardown

[sirtoby]

My dad recently moved houses, which required him to clean out his office. I was there to help him and was rewarded with quite a lot of old hardware. Mostly old floppy drives but also an old notebook. it was clearly broken, so I followed the words of Dave Jones: "Don't turn it on, take it apart".

The Notebook is a Compaq Contura 410C from around 1996. It was given to my dad by the company he worked for back then. 

Here are some specs of the "beast":

 

CPU: 40/50 MHz Intel 486DX/2 SL Enhanced

Ram: 4MB (upgraded to 12MB)

Display: 9.4" 640*480

HDD: 350MB

Oh, and it came with MS-DOS 6

 

Here are some pictures, for all of them, please go to the imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/G13b9

 

I kind of like the way the thing looks, Thinking about rebuilding it with a RaspberryPi2. The Trackball has a PS/2 interface, so I can keep using it. The keyboard is going to be problematic. It feels great, but the controller for it is in one of the asics on the main board. This would require me to get the wiring in the keyboard sorted out, which will result in hours of boredom

[Xanthe_2871]

Fascinating! 

[jcarter1105]

That is super cool! Do you have a usb adapter so that you can see what is on the hard drive? If you do decided to make it a rasberry Pi project. record it and post it to youtube I would love to see it!