
ThinkPad 560E - djsumdog
https://pappp.net/?p=26440
======
DonHopkins
>It didn’t come with a cap on the TrackPoint, so I swiped a proper “classic
dome” from the spares that came with my T60p to make everything period correct
(aside: why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are
cheap and everywhere). I still don’t care for Trackpoints, but it has cachet.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461)

>Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2]
or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of
research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written
up and published the story. [3]

>[...]

>Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad,
and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted
noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified
and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and
shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a
big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the
coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!

>He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always
carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.

~~~
neilv
> _why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are cheap
> and everywhere_

The older sandpaper TrackPoint caps can scratch your display surface. Though
some of the softer ones will also mark the display surface, but not as badly.

I have a small stockpile of caps of different kinds, including some originals
(and in nonstandard colors), usually end up using the soft shallow concave or
shallow convex ones.

Even if you mix up the colors, you can't escape the distinctive branding.
Maybe several years ago, during an I-don't-wear-logos phase, I was using a
ThinkPad T60 with black TrackPoint cap, and with black labelmaker tape
carefully cut to obscure the branding. One day, I was sitting on the grass in
front of the public library. Some group of kindergarteners is cutting across
the grass, and one of them glances at my ThinkPad with the blacked-out
branding, and immediately says, to no one in particular, "thassa IBM!" I
would've gotten away with being branding-free, if it weren't for those
meddling kids!

~~~
PAPPPmAc
(Author's HN account) Hmm. Maybe I'll leave the cap off in storage, then. I do
remember some of my more modern ThinkPads getting a screen dot from their
TrackPoints, but those machines spent a lot of time in backpacks getting
lugged around.

~~~
neilv
I don't recall whether the 560E was susceptible to TrackPoint marks, nor
pressure marks. I definitely did get both on some of my ThinkPads of that era
that saw lots of carrying in backpacks.

BTW, thank you for the writeup on the 560E. It's a good little laptop, and a
lot of open source work was done on it, sitting in parks and cafes. :)

------
byw
I'm surprised there hasn't been a spiritual successor of the original
ThinkPads from a premium small-scale producer in Shenzhen (that I'm aware of),
given the amount of niche mom & pop phone/PC producers over there.

(I know there's a company that puts new chips in old chassis, but it'd be
great to see new chassis from scratch as well).

~~~
emptyparadise
How I'd love to see something like classic ThinkPads again: completely self-
serviceable and upgradeable with plenty of parts and lots of support
available. So sick of glue and crazy proprietary chips and boards.

~~~
dTal
Modern ThinkPads are still best-in-breed for that (the T-series, at any rate).
They still come with full service manuals and individually available spare
parts, which can often be swapped between similar chassis. And the T480 is one
of the last remaining holdouts against soldered-everything and razor-thin.

------
ptrincr
I first heard of openstep from this brilliant post yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588)
... and here it pops up again.

~~~
Lammy
Not just OpenStep, but Rhapsody! It was Apple's original transition plan for
Mac OS X, basically OpenStep/Mach 5.x with a Mac OS 8-style Platinum UI done
in NeXT-style Display PostScript complete with draggable menus. It's my
favorite Apple product of all time just for the "what could have been" factor,
but the Adobes of the world balked at "rewrite your apps in Yellow Box" so we
got Carbon and friends in the rebooted Mac OS X project. There was one retail
release as "Mac OS X Server 1.0", but the "Premier" desktop-user-focused
version was canceled. I like to run Rhapsody on my Power Mac G3 Blue&White
because that particular machine shipped with Rhapsody (in a Server G3
configuration) and is extremely well supported:
[https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-
rhapsody-201...](https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-
rhapsody-20130909.png)

And here are some good starting points for more info:

[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_\(operating_system\))

[http://rhapsodyos.org/](http://rhapsodyos.org/)

~~~
zymhan
I had no idea Rhapsody OS existed! I really want to give the Mac OS Server 1.0
a spin on a PPC machine!

------
KC8ZKF
Five or six years ago, I bought a lot of three ThinkPad R40 Celerons sold for
parts, hoping to get one useable machine. I did, ending up with a rather
pedestrian LXDE Linux laptop.

Just this week I got a second one running with a whopping 256 MB of RAM, and
put OS/2 (ArcaOS) on it. It’s quite a snappy machine. Loads of fun.

~~~
h2odragon
I had an R40 run as a router / home server for 12 years, until this January.
Lovely machines.

[https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-
beginning.html#cracktop](https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-
beginning.html#cracktop)

~~~
abhijat
Its not quite low end but I use a T480 with ubuntu as a home server for plex
etc.

I set it up to boot from the ACPI signal and run with lid closed so it boots
from the wall switch.

~~~
dTal
"Not quite" is an understatement, that's a nearly brand new premium laptop.
Isn't it a shocking waste to use such a thing for a server, and not - say - a
Raspberry Pi 4? Like using a Porsche as a standing generator.

~~~
abhijat
I actually used a raspberry Pi for a while as a Plex server but it's
underpowered for transcoding.

I dont use that laptop at all these days so I put it to use there.

------
neilv
I didn't imagine seeing a post about the 560E on HN, :) but here's some
vintage Linux support and hardware notes: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-
thinkpad-560e/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/)

If you can't find replacement batteries, and you're willing to do the research
to make sure you do it safely, you might be able to put new cells in an old
battery.

Since (IIRC) you'll probably need PCMCIA for WiFi anyway, rather than getting
past mini-PCIe allowlisting, there's less motivation to bring up Coreboot on
it. But you could try.
[https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/)

The 560E was a fine machine, and probably close to the last best ThinkPad. A
few ThinkPad models later, when I moved to the T60, I didn't like the T60 as
much, including the keyboard and fit&finish. Still, today I transplant
original T60 keyboards into somewhat newer ThinkPads (since, in the generation
after the T60, the keyboard backing started flexing too much, and also, the
key action otherwise doesn't seem as reliable). Another reason to find
original T60 keyboards is that a lot of the new replacement keyboard parts now
are very low-quality counterfeits, e.g., bad key action, and requiring
multiple presses of a TrackPoint button to get one to register, on a new unit.
(So bad, that cleaning 20 years of strangers' crumbs and dandruff out of an
original keyboard starts to seem like even more of an attractive idea.)

------
twoodfin
I’d love to hear the modern “Be would have been better” case. Apple’s purchase
/ reverse acquisition of NeXT seems so obviously correct in retrospect.

Didn’t Steve Jobs carry around a ThinkPad running OpenStep (later Rhapsody?)
the first few years he was back at Apple?

~~~
PAPPPmAc
(Author chiming in, you've given me an opportunity for one of my favorite
sport-arguments)

I'll admit that even Jean-Louis Gassée (Former Mac head, Be founder) later
said NeXT+Steve was the right choice (see:
[https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-
chose-...](https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-
jobss-next-over-my-beos/) ) - though he said it for personal reasons based on
his contempt for Apple's management.

Some not-carefully-composed points of argument that Be might have been the
right choice, because I like doing it for sport:

BeOS was truly a ground-up creation, OpenStep was a Display PostScript
environment largely licensed from Adobe running on a hacked-up Mach with some
BSD pieces pulled inside the kernel boundary to make performance acceptable
(this is XNU, the kernel Apple still uses in everything). That had two points
for Be - Apple had to replace the whole display layer, partly for licensing
cost reasons and partly because developers weren't interested in dealing with
the "Yellow Box" OpenStep API or being stuck in the "Blue Box" legacy
compatibility jail. Equally or more important, BeOS was vastly more performant
on the same hardware - doing the "the UI stays responsive while I'm playing a
dozen media files back on this shitty Pentum MMX" stunt was always a blast
around the turn of the century. BeOS was also naively SMP with a nifty and
mostly pleasant thread model that has some advantages (and annoyances) over
the dominant event loop way of things, but always remained responsive, while
Apple inherited the spinning beach ball from NeXT.

For another big technical point that history actually agrees with me on,
OpenStep used a passable UFS implementation (that Apple reverted to HFS+,
which was already getting long in the tooth in the late 90s, apparently
largely because Adobe wouldn't get their shit together to make their products
run on a case-sensitive FS...), but BeFS was lovely in ways we're finally
getting elsewhere 20+ years later - exactly so in fact, Apple eventually hired
Dominic Giampaolo who designed BeFS to design APFS, and it really shows.

BeOS was also already suited for semi-embedded applications, both in various
commercial multimedia gadgets, and also the BeIA internet appliance stuff.
Since the bulk of modern NextStep-family devices are phones and tablets,
there's no reason to think a Gasse/Be Apple wouldn't have thrived in this
environment (I know, Palm borrowed Be parts for Palm OS Cobalt and didn't do
well, but maybe they were already doomed by that time).

Also, Be was _profoundly_ personal, looking toward a "everyone has their own
WebServer running their personal services" kind of future, rather than the
"Everyone back into the ~~mainframe~~ major cloud provider" future we got, and
I can't help but thinking having one of the big industry players not in the
roach-motel platform game would have been good for society.

Jobs did in fact use a ThinkPad running OpenStep/Rhapsody builds around the
time of the NeXT-buys-Apple-with-Apple's-Money situation. It was a 560 (not
E), there is a NextComputers forum thread about it where Marc J. Driftmeyer
who set up the machine Steve had at Macworld '97 talks about it
[http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0)
.

~~~
DonHopkins
This is the first time I've heard of the "NeXT-buys-Apple-with-Apple's-Money"
meme. That's hilarious! What's the back story behind that?

Reminds me of the old joke I heard years before I went to work at Kaleida,
which then became my day-to-day reality:

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

~~~
PAPPPmAc
The short version is most of Apple's management was replaced with NeXT folks
within a few years, and the combined company behaved more like NeXT than
Apple.

The degree to which Apple in the 90s was dysfunctional is pretty legendary,
they started trying to replace the creaking 68k, cooperative multitasking
hacked in after the fact classic Mac OS before 1988 and were still shipping
what were supposed to be short-term life support releases until 2001 (...and
really until 2002 because 10.0 on available hardware was miserable). They kept
losing their replacement plans to development hell. A/UX was a nifty Mac/UNIX
hybrid that came out in '88, and it was going to be the future, but was
expensive (real UNIX license), deeply tied to 68k hardware, and the 4.0
PowerPC port never came out because it collapsed under the weight of "Build a
combined OSF platform out of A/UX and (IBM's) AIX that takes over from both
and rules the whole computing market" ambitions. That joint project also
included Taligent, an OOP-platform-thing that is basically the benchmark for
failed software development. There was also Copland, which was a separate in-
house microkernel-based OS that was supposed to be MacOS 8, developed between
'94-96... that the Platinum theme was the only survivor from.

I think part of the reason they _did_ go with NeXT is OpenStep looked a lot
like the Pink/Taligent platform plan, but not bungled.

...I have a draft of a few-page humorous telling of the "How Apple and IBM
spent 15 years failing to write OSes" story but I keep tweaking it and need to
dig up my copy of _Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business
Blunders_ to add a few references, and find some better reference material for
the OS/2 fiasco between IBM and Microsoft that is one of the core "all this
90s tech industry dysfunction fits together" points most of the tellings miss.

------
ubermonkey
Wow. I had a 560Z, which was the same form factor but with different options.
I'm completely unsurprised that some still exist in great shape, because those
machines were insanely overengineered. Mine showed no real wear after 2.5
years of daily use including no small amount of travel, and by that point it
had stopped being appealing as a work platform.

It was actually my last daily-driver Windows machine. I was working mostly in
Office apps at the time, and Win95/98 was just GARBAGE on a laptop. You
couldn't reliably sleep. It crashed all the time. Eventually, it drove me to
buy a Mac, based on the experiences of one of my business partners. This was
pre-OSX, so the OS was only about 30% more stable than Win95, but sleep worked
EVERY TIME, and the whole system was more responsive.

Then the dot-com crash happened, and OS X happened, and I went back to coding
as a solo act.

But I sure have fond memories of that 560Z.

------
calvinmorrison
Imagine using a computer for, I don't know... Work or something. Typing a
letter? Spreadsheets? Tax software, not taking. Seems like you could do all
that and more on this.

~~~
jeffbee
Certainly with 80MB of memory you could do all that and more. This machine is
more capable in most respects than the machine that was on my desk when that
was supposedly a scientific workstation. With 80MB this laptop can easily run
Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, almost anything.

------
paulmd
mSATA to IDE adapters in a ‘2.5” replacement’ are widely available and I’d
prefer those to a SD card adapter over concerns about wear leveling.

------
nomdep
I had one of those almost 20 years ago. It was already old by then so I
install BeOS on it and used it for a while to play movies.

Now I regret that I got rid of it when it didn't boot. :(

------
mng2
I operated a 570 for a few years, back around 2006. I don't remember how I
decided to get one, but it could run Win2K, my preferred OS at the time, and
had a USB port. At the time I was doing most of my work through SSH and X
sessions... Firefox ran but it was slow. I remember sending the original
battery pack off to get rebuilt -- they probably weren't expecting such an
antique!

------
awiesenhofer
Wow, I never thought of seeing the 560E on the frontpage of HN. I still have
mine to play old win9x and DOS games. Runs Windows 98SE perfectly, on its
original HDD and is still just a joy to use. Had to transfer most of my old
games to it via IrDA, long before i finally bought a USB PCMCIA-Card. Never
had the external floppy drive though...

------
peter_d_sherman
>"Initially the battery was reporting itself dead, as you would expect for a
23 year old battery. On a whim I tried the “briefly near-short the battery
with a continuity tester in both directions and see if it will take a charge”
thing while I was probing to see if it showed any potential (it did, around
6v) – I got lucky, not only did it not catch fire, the original battery now
charges to “full” and holds a nontrivial charge, it claims an hour or two in
the battery meter which isn’t far from original claimed endurance."

Interesting! A technique for reviving (well, enough to boot and run!)
apparently dead laptop batteries... I did not know this was possible!

~~~
PAPPPmAc
It is neither reliable nor guaranteed safe. I have an MSEE and can't explain
to my own satisfaction why it sometimes works. The only thing I've read that
makes sense is that it resets the protection circuitry after an undervoltage
or other lock-out event.

------
projektfu
I had a 560X (233MHz Pentium MMX) that I loved. I was really into Squeak at
the time and did a lot of hacking with it. The keyboard eventually fell apart,
so I was surprised he found a usable one.

------
ferros
On a slightly related note, fun tip. If you have a ‘dead’ laptop or mobile
phone battery that’s too dead to even recharge.. I have ‘jumpstarted’ some by
connecting to a li-ion cordless drill battery for a few minutes.

I’ve managed to get a few old mobile phones back to life using this method.

Edit: as a safety note this is not recommended! Please read some of the
comments below!

~~~
londons_explore
This is, in general, a bad idea.

Lithium battery charge circuits generally have a fully charged voltage (about
4.2v), a fully discharged voltage (about 3.2v), and a 'do not attempt to
recharge below this' voltage (about 2.4v).

The reason circuits are designed not to recharge a cell below the 2.4v
threshold is because when you recharge below that voltage, gasses are
typically generated which eventually (many months later usually) burst the
plastic envelope of the battery, and the battery electrolyte then evaporates
as a highly flammable gas, killing the battery and potentially starting a fire
if there is a nearby ignition source.

TL:DR:. 'dead' batteries refuse to charge for safety reasons, and tricks to
bypass that safety mechanism might lead to a fire a few months down the line.

~~~
ferros
Appreciate the explanation, not information that’s readily found when you
search explanations on dead batteries.

------
mysterypie
> _It was listed as “No HDD” which was visibly a lie because this thing still
> has its screw cover stickers intact_

I’m trying to understand why anyone would lie about _not_ having a hard disk.
Is there some rule on the auction website that hard disks must have been
removed or wiped?

~~~
p_l
Seller not knowing combined with common approach of removing hard drives to
either sell separately or because of data wiping. The CMOS battery error could
have confused the final seller.

It's quite often that such finds come through multiple hands, and by the time
it hits eBay/whatever the seller has no idea what they are selling except
maybe for what's written on labels and can be decided in 5 minutes from
looking at the wares :)

That's how I bought my (former now) AlphaStation 255/233, I noticed the case
being sold as "old server case for use as HTPC" :)

~~~
PAPPPmAc
This. Goodwill's policy is, AFIK, a "reasonable measures to wipe" so once they
saw it fail to POST and no obvious HDD caddy they just listed.

------
smilekzs
I had a 600E! It was my very first laptop, and I learned Flash 4 (of
Macromedia era) on it. It stood out so much against its contemporaries and
made me a ThinkPad fan to this day.

~~~
nicklaf
In high school I ran Plan 9 on a 600E I found on ebay. The specs were plenty
fast enough to run the fourth edition of Plan 9, which hadn't gotten any
slower since the early 90s... and Bell Labs had thoroughly worked out the
driver kinks on that machine. I was even able to join wifi networks through
the PCMCIA card, which was also supported by Plan 9. Pretty fun to be running
a fully graphical Unix successor on native hardware with what probably is a
fraction of SLOC compared to most stripped down embedded Linux systems you'll
find today. When something went south you could just peak at the kernel source
code, and even on a Pentium II it would compile the changed objects in less
than a minute! And not even knowing C that well at the time, I made several
functional changes to the system. I can't imagine being that cavalier on Linux
today over a decade later....

To this day I'm not sure I've used a laptop that has as nice a form factor.
Especially wonderful was the tactile feel of the keyboard.

