Restoration and use of the vintage $5,000 Compaq LTE laptop from 1997

Nowadays almost everybody can afford a laptop, prices are starting from about $50. But not so long time ago it was a sort of luxury item. How did it feel to use such a machine? The only way to get an answer — is to try.

Hardware

Those who are not interested in technical details, can skip this part and continue reading from the software testing.

It is absolutely no problem to find any computer specs on the Internet. I can easily read that the Compaq LTE laptop has a 100 MHz Pentium processor and 8 or 16 MB of RAM. But was it enough and sufficient at that time? Was it convenient to use the device? Basically, specs tell almost nothing about the real user experience. So I decided to buy a laptop on eBay and to test how it works on my own.

In general, there are two ways to find a vintage laptop. The first, and in my opinion is also the most boring way, is to pay a lot for the refurbished device. The price can easily be in the 500–1000$ range, which is even more than you pay for many modern laptops. The second and also the more challenging way is to buy a laptop and to restore it yourself. The price can be much lower, but it is even more important, that it is much more fun and the restoration itself also gives an opportunity to learn something new and to get a new experience.

I’ve found this Compaq LTE 5150 for about $100 on eBay, and it will be the hero of this story:

The price was low not for vain: as the seller wrote, the disk drive was faulty, the screen was not working and the status display was also partially damaged. Finding spare parts for the discontinued model can be a problem, but, surprisingly, there are many spare parts available for Compaq LTE on eBay:

Maybe some companies are buying used laptops in non-working condition, disassemble and sell them as a spare parts source. Anyway, for an additional $100 I’ve got all parts needed: both displays (main and status display) and a spare CMOS battery.

The screen

A big advantage of the old design is an easy replacement of almost any part: the laptop can be disassembled by using only a screwdriver. To install a new screen it is enough to screw 4 screws and plug the connectors:

There are no proprietary screws or glued components at all. I am 99% sure that I will not be able to do the same with my modern Microsoft Surface laptop or with my smartphone.

The laptop also has a standard VGA connector, which can be used to connect the external monitor. For me, it was a workaround while the new screen was in delivery by post from the US to Europe.

Some modern monitors have no VGA port anymore, so a special “VGA to HDMI” adapter can be used:

By the way, it is important to know that the signal direction matters — there are other “HDMI to VGA” adapters that look similar but they are not suitable for our task.

Disk drives

A Compaq LTE laptop has a proprietary metal box for the hard disk drive, which will be tricky to find if it is missing. But inside the box there is a standard IDE-based drive, that can be easily replaced with a Compact Flash card using the CF to IDE adapter.

This CF-IDE adapter is electrically just a connector — the CF card itself has the same IDE interface so the connection is easy and the adapter is cheap. As a bonus, we get an absolutely silent drive with much less power consumption.

The second slot on my Compaq 5150 is used by a floppy disk drive. In theory, it can be replaced by CD, but I decided to keep it for “vintage” reasons. Surprisingly, there is enough old hardware (maybe industrial, scientific or medical) still operational in the world, and it is still possible to buy new floppy diskettes on Amazon:

I am not going to use and buy diskettes, but it is fun to know that I can do it if needed.

And finally, the Compaq LTE laptop has a PCMCIA slot, that can be useful as an external drive connector. It is easy to find a PCMCIA to CF adapter, I also tested CF to MicroSD adapter, both are working good.

So, there will be no problems copying large archives, like the MS Office or Photoshop installer, using the Compact Flash or MicroSD card.

Power supply

On my laptop, the power supply was working good. But it is still highly recommended to replace it — 20+ years old capacitors inside are definitely not in a good shape. The price of the universal laptop power supply can be 20–30$ on Amazon, not a big deal, and it will be much safer to use a new one. Just as an example, the Motorola power supply from 1997, I bought on eBay for an old 1G phone, became broken after 1 hour of use. So it definitely makes sense to spend $ 20–30 for a new power adapter and do not worry about it anymore.

Now the hardware part is ready, it is time to install the software.

System Install

We have a working PC, and we obviously need software for it. 20 years ago it was normal to install MS-DOS or Windows using a set of several floppy disks. But nowadays it is much easier to prepare the disk image using a virtual machine. We need to install a free Oracle VM VirtualBox and create a virtual computer in it.

The process is straightforward, there are also many good tutorials about it.

MS-DOS 6.22

The fastest way to run an old laptop is to install MS-DOS, the installer image files can be easily found online. The process is pretty straightforward:

We need to install MS-DOS to the disk drive on a virtual machine and verify that it works and the system is booting normally. Then two steps are needed. Firstly, we need to convert the virtual machine drive image to a raw format using the command:

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\vboxmanage" internalcommands converttoraw dos.vdi dos.img

The VM disk name dos.vdi can be different in your config (usually, virtual disk files can be found in the “C:\Users\[USER]\VirtualBox VMs" folder). Secondly, we need to write the newly created IMG file to the Compact Flash card. I’ve used a freeware “Win32 Disk Imager” for that:

After that, our image is ready — it’s time to put a Compact Flash card back in the laptop, and the system will boot.

Windows 95

This Compaq LTE laptop was made in 1997, so the obvious choice for the system is Windows 95. I recommend installing the latest Windows 95 OSR2.5 version — it has better hardware compatibility and can work with FAT32 drives, which makes life much easier (FAT16 drives are limited to 2 GB).

We already have MS-DOS installed, so the upgrade process is easy — it is enough to connect the Compact Flash card back to the PC and copy Windows 95 installation CD content in any folder on the card (the PCMCIA slot can not be used in DOS because of the lack of drivers, so we need to copy files to the card directly). Then we can boot in DOS again and run setup from the folder we saved.

The last step is to install the drivers, without them the sound will not be working and the screen resolution will be only 640x480. Surprisingly, it was not so easy — the Compaq developers made the installer which is working in MS-DOS and copying the files to a floppy disk only by using a low-level copy.

This looks strange, but maybe Compaq engineers did not have enough experience in making Windows software at that time, so they used an “old-school” way. Or maybe they just did not have enough time before the release to make a fancy Windows installer. Anyway, I did not want to use a floppy drive, but the virtual machine did the job — I extracted the drivers using the “virtual” floppy drive on the VM, then copied the files to the laptop.

Connectivity

In the 90s using a floppy drive was a sort of standard for copying files between computers, people did not worry too much about the lack of other connection types. But nowadays it can be a problem. This Compaq LTE is a sort of the first generation of Windows laptops:

There is no USB, no Ethernet, no WiFi. If we want to copy even a small file, we have a challenge.

Serial Port Transfer

As I mentioned before, we can use the “PCMCIA to CF” adapter to copy files. It can be nice for installing MS Office or Photoshop, but it will be too annoying to copy every file using this way. Luckily for us, we can use a serial port to transfer files, and the Hyper Terminal app which can do this is already included in Windows 95.

To establish a serial connection with my PC, I’ve used this cable:

This is actually a USB-Serial cable, a “Null-modem adapter” and a “DB9 Female to DB9 Female” adapter, connected all together. Then we can open Hyper Terminal on the laptop (the “Direct to COM1” connection should be used) and any serial terminal app on PC. For testing the link we can make a small chat between two computers:

Pretty impressive considering the 25 years of the time difference between both machines — too many interfaces and protocols were changed but it still works. But the most important is that we can also send and receive files:

The Hyper Terminal is using the ZModem protocol. On my Windows 10 PC, I was using the free Tera Term app, which can support this protocol as well.

The data transfer is obviously limited by the speed of the serial port. It will take too long to transfer the CD image but can be useful for sending small files, like texts or screenshots.

Internet

The next challenge is to connect the laptop to the Internet. 25 years ago it was normal to use a dial-up modem for the Internet connection, but now it’s a sort of rarity. I am even not sure if dial-up providers are still available for the general public (and even if they are available, their service is not free anyway). Luckily we can easily emulate the modem using the serial port connection. To do this, I’ve used a free “Hayes compatible modem script” which is available on GitHub. I will use the Raspberry Pi as an “internet provider” — to have a connection via the serial port we need a PPP service, which is available only for Linux, so the Raspberry Pi is the easiest choice.

First, we need to install files on the Raspberry Pi:

sudo apt-get install ppp
cd /home/pi/Documents
git clone https://github.com/molivil/vmodem
chmod +x /home/pi/Documents/vmodem/*.sh

The vmodem folder has 3 files. The “vmodem.sh” is actually emulating the modem and sending proper AT commands back to the laptop. The “1.sh” script will be executed when the modem is trying to virtually “dial” the number, in this case, the phone number should be “1”. And finally, the “ppp.sh” script will run the PPP service which will be used to send and receive data.

Before using a “vmodem.sh” script, we need to edit it, there are 3 important parameters:

# Variable: serport
serport=ttyUSB0

# Variable: baud
baud=19200

# Variable: etherp. Usually eth0 for wired and wlan0 for wireless.
etherp=eth0

In my case, the name was ttyUSB0 (we can get it by typing the ls /dev/tty* command on the Raspberry Pi), the speed I set to 19200, and the Internet network interface was wlan0 for the WiFi connection (if the Raspberry Pi is connected via Ethernet, it should be eth0).

Finally, we can run the script when we want to have a modem connection:

cd /home/pi/Documents/vmodem/
sudo ./vmodem.sh

On the laptop, I created a new connection. I set the “Standard 19200 modem” for the connection type and chose number “1” as the provider’s phone number (name and password do not matter), and we are ready to be connected:

After pressing “Connect”, we are online.

Last but not least — we know that the Internet Explorer in Windows 95 can not support HTTPS which is required for most modern websites. Can we fix that? Well, not completely, but enthusiasts created some workarounds, like the so-called Web Rendering Proxy, which can be downloaded for free from GitHub. The idea is simple — the proxy is running on a modern PC (in our case, it’s the Raspberry Pi that is handling our internet connection), where all requested web pages are rendering in memory. Results are sending to a browser in a form of simple HTML with all data embedded in a form of a gif or png layer. In theory, it allows opening any web page on a really old machine. It will probably be not the best web browsing experience in the world, but it can be interesting to see how some modern websites may look on the vintage screen with low resolution.

We can run the web rendering proxy on the Raspberry Pi. Let’s download the file from GitHub and make it executable:

wget https://github.com/tenox7/wrp/releases/download/4.5.2/wrp-arm-linux
chmod +x wrp-arm-linux

Then we can run the proxy using the ./wrp-arm-linux command.

From the “ppp.sh” modem script we know that the IP address of the Raspberry Pi is always 10.0.100.1. The http://10.0.100.1:8080 web page will be available on Windows 95 browser when the proxy is running.

Now the software setup for this laptop is finished. Let’s finally see how it works.

User Experience

There are many reviews of the vintage hardware where reviewers are just playing games. For me, it looks weird, especially when testing portable devices which were having a price comparable to a decent car. Let’s be honest, these 5K$ machines originally were not intended for gaming, their price range was just too high for that. So, let’s talk about productivity and business software.

Hardware

The very first impression — the laptop is really heavy. The weight of a computer with an installed floppy disk drive and a battery is 3400g.

The colour of the device is beige, which was typical for office computers of that time. At the backside, there is plenty of the most popular connectors from the 90s — COM, LPT, VGA and even an Infrared port for connecting the Palm or Psion organizer. Two PCMCIA slots can be used for connecting a modem, network card or external drive. This is obviously not a gaming machine but the computer has a sound card and the screen has internal speakers, so running some games or watching the video can be possible.

The mechanical keyboard is good even for modern standards, which is not surprising considering the plenty of space, the Compaq laptop is obviously not slim. The 12.1" TFT 800x600 LCD screen looks also good for its time (see the first image in the article as an example), especially comparing to the older black and white portable LCD displays.

Last but not least, it was possible to buy a docking station, it turned the laptop into a full-sized desktop PC. It was even possible to install an ISA expansions card inside.

This solution is completely disappeared nowadays.

Internet

As I described before, it is physically possible to connect the laptop to the Internet. Alas, this connection is mostly useless. For example, we can ping the website:

We can open the www.google.com website and get some search results:

Alas, there is not so much more, we can do. We can get some search results from Google, but we can not even open pages that were found. Modern websites went too far ahead within the last 25 years and are not compatible anymore with a Windows 95 browser. Every page which requires HTTPS and TLS support, just will not be opened:

As a workaround, we can try the Web Rendering Proxy which was described earlier. To activate the proxy, I need to open the http://10.0.100.1:8080 address in the browser and enter the webpage address I want. Well, it is not so fast but it really works:

Other online services which were popular at the end of the 90s, like MSN or ICQ, are obviously down, the connection to the server cannot be established.

Productivity

Microsoft Office was a pretty powerful tool in 1997. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) was not a new technology in 1995, but since the 80s the Microsoft Office has evolved and matured enough. In my opinion, the Office 95 features can cover 99% of users requests even nowadays.

Comparing to the modern days, the main difference is screen resolution and pixel density. We use to have high-resolution screens, on which the text or image always looks sharp. On the 800x600 screen, it can be a problem, for example when a picture is inserted into the text, all small details in the picture are not visible anymore.

Adobe Photoshop 5.0 is surprisingly good even nowadays. It can work with text and layers, has many graphical filters, and the design and hotkeys are in general the same (I was even thinking if Adobe did any real improvements within the last 20 years:). Of course, the processing power of the 100MHz CPU is much lower than on any modern PC. For example, it takes 5–10s to open the 2MPx photo with 1600x1200 resolution.

On the other side, the typical digital cameras resolution in the 90s was something like 1280x960 or even 640x480, so practically it was not a problem.

Standard software, included with Windows, like Notepad or Paint, did not change too much even today. For those who want to write the code, it is possible to install Visual Studio 5.0, the IDE looks fine and has a nice debugger (even today the Arduino IDE has fewer features than Visual Studio had 25 years ago;).

Lots of applications were made for Windows 95, and I am not going to test them all, but I hope readers got the main idea.

Conclusion

It was interesting to test this laptop, and I’ve got a pretty positive feeling after using the Compaq LTE. Especially when compared with a PC I had that time when I was a student, it was something like 80486 in a form of a big heavy metal box that occupied half of the table. Of course, there was no question of any portability of that PC, which could be useful, for example, for travelling to parents or to a girlfriend. But there was also no question of spending $5,000 on such a laptop for a student, so I just had no choice. This is interesting to compare because modern students can get a laptop almost for free, even without thinking a lot about it. It is also fun to test old software like Microsoft Office 95 or Photoshop 5.0, and surprisingly, its functionality isn’t really as bad as people might expect.

For those who are interested, I can recommend making a similar test on their own — it will give a much better understanding of how things work. It is still possible to find vintage hardware for a reasonable price, and it can give a real “immersive” experience, that no museum, article or video review can give.