Hehe, I have a 701 sitting around here. Still works, to a degree.
On the other hand, the battery is long gone, there is no floppy, no CD ROM, no builtin ethernet, so I cannot get any data on or off that device or install a different operating system. Hence, I am stuck with Windows 95 and Office 95. I am keeping it because I kind of like having a 20 year old laptop,
but it is not actually useful.
But the keyboard is awesome. And it had 24 MB of RAM, while my first PC in 1996 came with 8. Must have been pretty expensive back in the day.
There are businesses who will take your old battery, crack it open and put in fresh cells. Or you can do it yourself.
> there is no floppy, no CD ROM, no builtin ethernet, so I cannot get any data on or off that device or install a different operating system.
You have a 16 bit PCMCIA slot, and you can still find cards for that if you look hard enough. (I picked up an original Orinoco wifi card for under $10.) Remember, the gold stripe on the card means 32 bit. Avoid those.
And the standard way for working with these old computers is to get an external HDD case and swap out the drive. Or anything that you can use as a USB-IDE adapter. Then you can install whatever you want. Though you really shouldn't use spinning rust that old. I typically use a 16GB CF card in a CF-IDE adapter. (I do this in my 600E, for example.) It works very well since the protocols are the same.
I am genuinely curious since I've always considered batteries to be something to be handled with care. I mean, it's not like you are carrying around a pack of TNT, but I would've never thought of opening it to replace the cells.
For example, do the batteries have internal circuitry that could cause problems if you put in the wrong kind of cell?
I had seen pictures of opened battery packs before, and I definitely thought they looked like regular AA batteries.
But I also never thought that it wasn't only the looks.
It would be nice to have this same analysis done for different models. Like having a database for battery pack models where you could find the ordering of the batts, the chips that they have etc.
Also, what would've happened if the corrosion actually had killed the chip? then what? can you find parts to replace those?
It's not particularly dangerous. If you can jumpstart a car, you can do this.
The key is to remember that laptop batteries are rarely produced by people with actual battery expertise. Instead, they string together a certain number of (usually) AA-sized battery cells to produce the appropriate voltage and put that in a custom case.
Crack open the case, read the numbers, order replacement cells, swap, check with a voltmeter, close it up and try it out.
Why have we not seen the butterfly keyboard used since that Thinkpad, or have I not been looking carefully enough? The design seems to have been positively received and fondly remembered. Have the problems it solved been solved in other ways (like proliferation of widescreens)?
Back when IBM had an outlet store in RTP (at the Morrisville outlet mall), I asked one of the employees there about the keyboard and why it wasn't carried forward to new models. He said they had a lot of returns on them, as the cam that controlled the sliding-puzzle-action when the lid was opened wore more quickly than expected.
It really was a unique design and got the Thinkpad line a lot of good press, so I think it was successful in that aspect.
Because it is expensive and contains quite a lot of moving parts, requiring precision engineering and possibly manual assembly. I doubt these were scalable to mass production. (Additionally, it contributed to the thickness of assembly — tho those who don't remember, Thinkpad 701 was _incredibly_ thick).
I owned a 701c, the keyboard was clearly better than anything available today.
Another example is "Big Berta" (IBM T220/T221), a 21" screen with full 4K resolution available back in 2001! It offered PPI resolution better than modern Retina displays.
I'm wondering what the best software for this would be given a 133 mhz cpu and 72 mb of RAM. Do you try to trim down a modern linux distro, or do you use an OS of a similar vintage? No possibility of getting a modern browsing experience on those specs, so probably the vintage OS offers the best experience.
Plan 9 would run well. Netbsd would be solid, particularly if you don't care about X. Openstep if you could find a CD. Minix.
That's an amazing amount of RAM for that era, and OS/2 4.0 would probably run well on it, with no need to hunt for graphics drivers. Get Turbo C or Turbo Pascal for DOS, Word for windows, solid multitasking.
BeOS/intel won't run - that needed pentium arch or above. BeOS would fly on an old pentium thinkpad with that much RAM though. Network stack is patchy, but the media API remains impressive.
There's no way youre using a modern linux distro here. Even something like puppylinux which is designed for "old" computers expects around 256mb of ram.
72mb of ram doesn't get you much nowadays. Maybe you can install Damn Small Linux and get some basic functionality. Someone on /r/sysadmin tried reviving an old 486 laptop recently and I believe he could only get DSL to work, but had significant driver problems. I think he had much less ram, like 16mb or so.
72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily and maybe even Windows 2000 or even XP, though I'm not sure how usable XP would be even if it did boot.
edit: I found someone running puppy on 64meg of ram.
> 72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily
Very easily - we used to have lots of 32MB NT4 machines. I think the system requirements were only 12 or 16MB (as usual wishful thinking really). Although I think the eventual resource usage of SP6 was a lot higher than the RTM version.
> and maybe even Windows 2000
I tried Win2K Pro on a 486DX2 66 with 64MB once - it worked but was very very slow. I suspect the cpu and disk were a bigger factor than the amount of ram.
Man I used to play a lot with Puppy and DSL, brings back some fond memories. Just for fun, I spun up an Ubuntu Trusty VM in VirtualBox with 64 MB of RAM and it works just fine (after uninstalling Puppet and Chef).
I've run Puppy on <128mb of RAM, although not recently. You probably would have to use Dillo or Links as a web browser instead of a Mozilla based browser.
72MB isn't terribly small. You can even run X on that (assuming it supports the graphics) and one of the old school window managers. Modern web browsers tend to be massive memory hogs so they might cause problems, but just starting X won't break the bank.
The 133Mhz CPU might actually be more of a problem, especially for stuff like Web Browsers that tend to assume that cpu cycles are free. I've run Chrome on a Raspberry Pi, which is clocked almost 8x higher than this laptop and feels sluggish at best. You would probably be better off X-Displaying a browser from somewhere else and using the box mostly for terminals and SSH sessions.
On the other hand, the battery is long gone, there is no floppy, no CD ROM, no builtin ethernet, so I cannot get any data on or off that device or install a different operating system. Hence, I am stuck with Windows 95 and Office 95. I am keeping it because I kind of like having a 20 year old laptop, but it is not actually useful.
But the keyboard is awesome. And it had 24 MB of RAM, while my first PC in 1996 came with 8. Must have been pretty expensive back in the day.