Circa 2000 I was using a Compaq Contura 4/25cx laptop with Debian Slink, 2.0.36 kernel. It had a 486 at 25 MHz and 4 MB RAM. I also got a parallel port Ethernet

Circa 2000 I was using a Compaq Contura 4/25cx laptop with Debian Slink, 2.0.36 kernel. It had a 486 at 25 MHz and 4 MB RAM. I also got a parallel port Ethernet adapter from the same dumpster dive. Even with Slink installing with 4 MB RAM required some special care. My notes from the time say it took one and a half minutes to boot. There existed a driver in XFree86 for the funky Compaq AVGA graphics so I could use X, but the limited RAM made it impossibly slow to run any kind of desktop environment or even a window manager. The setup I used on it was the zed text editor in one text console, shell for running LaTeX in another console and the gv Postscript viewer without a window manager running on a X screen. I wrote quite a lot of lab reports that way. Documentation about that setup was one of the first web pages I made: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/contura/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/contura/