<sigh>

Delivery from relatives. I now have three of these. One has a cracked screen. Only one hard drive and one power cable between the three of them. I'm told they've been in a cardboard box in a garage for the past thirty years.

I am resisting the urge to plug one of these in until I've gotten a look at the insides, first.

#Retrocomputing #Beige

I'm impatient, and I figured one of these has a cracked screen already, so what about trying to power up that one?

Well, the screen stays black, but the power light came in straight away and it tries to read the floppy drive. I'm impressed, I admit. 1993 Compaq built well.

#Retrocomputing

I'm tempted to try another one, with an intact screen. Anyone out there work on these? How bad is this idea?

Wait, before I try one of the more intact laptops, I have a perfectly good monitor downstairs that has VGA input.

...

Oh for fuck's sake.

Bear with me while I format a #DOS boot floppy ...

No dice. I tried two different disks, one with FreeDOS 1.4 and another with MS-DOS 6.22. The laptop drive doesn't recognize either of them as a system disk.

This looks like something to sell at the #MITFlea / #Swapfest to someone who wants a project.