A look at IBM's short-lived "butterfly" ThinkPad 701 of 1995
fastcompany.com99 points by vontzy 4 days ago
99 points by vontzy 4 days ago
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:
For more on the background out of which this was developed see:
_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy
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 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.
This is amazing work without going the full custom way we often see modder do with upgraded internals.
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.
They have power management, you know. I guess, in the future, they will market processor speed as "it depends". /s
Have you tried to benchmark things on a laptop recently? Without the intricate and largely undocumented dance with perf_event_open and rdpmc to actually get access to the raw cycle counter, the results you’ll get will, in fact, be “it depends” (easily 20% in either direction; 50% if you’re not keeping track of whether you’ve turned on the AC or opened the window). On Windows, the dance is even more tedious, as you’re going to have to account for and subtract every context switch by hand. And on truly awful CPUs like Intel’s first attempts at AVX-512, even the cycle count is not enough to fully give you an idea of “performance”.
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 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 owned one of these back in the day and loved it. Not long ago I did a total restoration of one: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...
I was riveted by your account, because I own one and I'd love to get it working again.
Do it! To be fair, it was a ton of work to get it working again but I'm happy-ish with the result.
It hurts to look at this page. So many ads, video playing in the background. What the hell?
You don't have to put up with the Internet like that. Install uBlock Origin, turn off media autoplay in your browser settings (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay), and consider installing NoScript.
iPhone Chrome?
There are many ad blocking solutions for iOS, though I don't have the knowledge to recommend one myself.
Hopefully one day, Europe will force Apple to let users install better web browsers than Safari.
I’m on mobile, people. Of course on desktop I use an ad blocker. You also might guess, I’m using iOS.
Never realized they were that short lived. I loved playing with those at CompUSA. Always wanted one.
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.
I had that thing for years.
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.
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.
I got ahold of one long after it was obsolete and that keyboard was awesome. Someone needs to bring back the design.
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.
Ad took over the screen and I couldn’t get out. Had to kill the browser. Not reading sites that are that inconsiderate.
Anybody selling one?
Wasn't this in Robocop 3?
Obviously, based on its price, it was a commercially unsuccessful product. Really want to buy one, when I was a student.
> it was a commercially unsuccessful product.
Was it?
According to the article "A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995’s best-selling PC laptop." As the article says, $3,799–$5,649 was "not cheap, but not absurd at the time."
For reference the PowerBook 500 series sold "almost 600,000" units in 1994-1996 according to Wikipedia and the color screen models were $2,900-$4,840.
I doubt its discontinuation had that much to do with the price. A lot of Japanese market electronics until ~2010 were intended to capture that season's bonus pay in one big batch and then go out flush by the next one, more like movies than cars, or iPhones today. All all-new and groundbreaking every halves of years.
Moore's Law was in full effect too, everything was going obsolete as quick as time itself. Specifications values inflated in orders of 10^2 units per week, whether it was megahertz or megapixel or megabytes or grams. Making last year's new product, even with parts upgrades, was waste of time.
The big thing is screen sizes obsoleted the need for the expanding keyboard when they became cost-effective for "normal" keyboards and the device itself could be lightweight by being thin rather than small.
"Thin and large" is specifically American obsession. Those weren't just major technical challenges, Japanese users cared less about those two aspects. People wanted an inflatable do-everything brick. The butterfly keyboard served that demand.
I remember the first time seeing one unfold, I was like "wait, what?". Do that again. Big fan of the nub, would still use one if it was on my Macbook.
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
>Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Ah, well. I tried it under a Gemini proxy too, same message.
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):
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
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.