Oh yes, I bought mine for £400 in about 1999 or 2000. It ran Windows 95 well, Win98SE OK if cut down hard with 98Lite, and Windows 2000 very very poorly indeed.
I would have run OS/2 Warp on it, but the internet connectivity was lacking.
I had two Xircom RealPort2 cards in mine, giving it 10MB/s Ethernet and a 56K modem.
I had one! I bought a used IBM ThinkPad 701 in a Hong Kong computer market in 1996 while backpacking through China and Southeast Asia. I think it was $800 or $900.
Although primitive by today's standards, it was a solid little laptop that served me well for the tasks I was engaged in at the time … writing, Web surfing (on a very slow modem), learning HTML, and playing Doom.
It had a color screen, a big improvement over the greyscale screen I had on my previous laptop (no name Taiwanese brand that cost $2000 new!)
The 701 also easily fit in a book bag, although it was a bit thick and heavy.
There are some more photos and historical information about the 701 here:
At this point, my rule of thumb for laptops, phones, and tablets is the thicker the better. I avoid anything that is specifically being marketed as 'thin'. What an anti-feature.
Have fun learning a browser for the blind, but unvaluable
for the hacker (either sighted or not).
Fast guide (you ed users already know how to use
edbrowse, just glance a bit at the docs/ and you are done):
0z24 #we go to the top of the page
# and set scrollling height
z # page down
z # pagedown
/foo #term to search
g1 # if we are seeing {a link} {another one}, go to the first one.
rf #refresh the page
editing and submitting forms takes a while to learn, but you can read the docs and that's it.
If you are a blind user at HN (and there is at least one I know), you can use yasr with speech-dispatcher to read your terminal.
These book-sized vintage laptops are great. Prefer the Olivetti Quaderno or the IBM Palmtop PC110 tho; the 701's keyboard is just a gimmick to me. But then again, I don't have to worry about fat fingers.
IBM used to have an outlet store at a mall near the Raleigh Durham airport (prior to the sale of the PC division to Lenovo), and they had some for sale. I was sorely tempted but even at the time it was underpowered. Such a cool design though.
I had one just as they were leaving the retail market. I loved that compact little guy. Trackpoint nub and full-size keyboard, very lightweight for the time, and I was mostly programming in EMACS via a terminal emulator when I wasn't MUDding via terminal emulator or writing specs.
I did Thinkpad tech support at IBM right around the time these were discontinued. Great machine, rarely had any problems aside from getting drivers and IRQs configured when folks decided to install Win95
That was a fun era when IBM was trying all kinds of things with the ThinkPads. I had a used 755CV with the detachable backlight. It was an interesting idea in that time when we didn't have cheap video projectors yet.
I had one of these in high school when it was already considered old. I had gotten it from someone who had moved on to a newer laptop. I really regret not keeping this around, I did not realise back then what a special piece of hardware this was!
This was my first laptop. I was a junior tech and all the senior VPs, etc. had them and hated them (they were execu-toys). One of the VPs gave me his in trade for a "normal" laptop plus a desktop in his office.
Coincidentally, I bought one of these recently and it was delivered this morning. Including the MultiPort II port replicator and floppy drive. Boots and runs fine (sans some unhappy memory locations and dead CMOS). Need to clone the disk so I can poke around on the stuff still on it. It's got NetWare on it, excel, word, powerpoint, netscape navigator, and mosaic. Somewhat spooked about spinning it up too many times.
The keyboard mechanism is much more satisfying than I expected. Jealous of anyone who got to use one when they were new.
I wanted one of these so bad. Never got one but I did love my 600. The ergonomics on the era of Thinkpads was never topped. Such great keyboards. And the grippy rubberized exterior. Everything felt good.
I still have one. It still boots last time I checked a few years ago (either SuSE or Red Hat 5.x IIRC) although it's battery is now kaput and can only work plugged in.
It was my workhorse in college and it was amazing throughout years of regular use.
25 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 43.6 ms ] thread_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad
I would have run OS/2 Warp on it, but the internet connectivity was lacking.
I had two Xircom RealPort2 cards in mine, giving it 10MB/s Ethernet and a 56K modem.
Although primitive by today's standards, it was a solid little laptop that served me well for the tasks I was engaged in at the time … writing, Web surfing (on a very slow modem), learning HTML, and playing Doom.
It had a color screen, a big improvement over the greyscale screen I had on my previous laptop (no name Taiwanese brand that cost $2000 new!)
The 701 also easily fit in a book bag, although it was a bit thick and heavy.
There are some more photos and historical information about the 701 here:
http://renaissancechambara.jp/2012/04/26/ibm-thinkpad-701/
I might run it under edbrowse with Duktape. And it worked, but without Javascript enabled to my surprise:
https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse
Have fun learning a browser for the blind, but unvaluable for the hacker (either sighted or not).
Fast guide (you ed users already know how to use edbrowse, just glance a bit at the docs/ and you are done):
editing and submitting forms takes a while to learn, but you can read the docs and that's it. If you are a blind user at HN (and there is at least one I know), you can use yasr with speech-dispatcher to read your terminal.Guide for OpenBSD users:
https://blog.thechases.com/posts/bsd/setting-up-a-terminal-s...
Edbrowse doubles as an editor, mail client and irc one too. And gopher of course. So, yasr will do a brilliant job there.
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:755CV
I had that thing for years.
The keyboard mechanism is much more satisfying than I expected. Jealous of anyone who got to use one when they were new.
It was my workhorse in college and it was amazing throughout years of regular use.