Think Pad

The ThinkPad has this cool feature that you can flip up the keyboard and yank major assemblies without so much as using a penny for a screwdriver. I've been traveling with a ThinkPad recently. And I've been bringing along a couple hard disks, one configured to our group standards and loaded up with group productivity software, the other with the latest and greatest company stuff that I use to talk to the web.

So I had the lid up one evening while I was swapping the hard drive and I got to thinking about every one of those assemblies. Who needs them? Why are they there? Let's think for a moment. What we would have to do to eliminate them?

Battery. In standard usage, you boot off the battery while you hook up all of the little cords and boxes that you brought along with you in that case. This is handy because it will be mostly through the boot sequence by the time you are ready to work. You can't really do your job off battery because you're hooked on that back-lit color screen. It's great. I've tried to live with the dark and slow screens of battery powered PDAs. I'd rather have the wire. Solution: Boot with one transfer of FullBlocks the instant the power umbilical hits the back of the machine.

or build your system out of ReversibleLogic

Floppy Disk. I ran my first mac off one and it worked ok. But that was then and this is now. It's in the box for communication, not storage. Solution: I vote for the web page as the unit of compatible communication.

...interesting observation. We're gonna have to add another black-box assembly to support it though: wireless internet communication (which may also eliminate need for infra-red port.)

Hard Disk. I know a lot of people would miss their disk drives, but not me. I back up about 250 megabytes when I backup my main machine. But mostly that is just because I have no idea where among those megabytes my 500 bytes of software configuration information has been hidden. (I know I would be disabled without those 500 bytes. I had a friend who lost his unix dot files once. It took him a week to restore his account to usable.) I write and share documents for a living. I save an occasional draft on the ThinkPad but would really rather have them in a private draft section on the server. Solution: Save highly personal keys and configuration information on a PCMCIA card that I could pull and lock in my desk drawer. Save the remaining kilobytes I produce on an accessible, reliable and secure server.

Keyboard. Pitch it too. I'll dock with a keyboard when I need to get clerical. The rest of the time I'll pick and sort in executive mode by tapping and dragging on the top half of my ThinkPad, which I'll have resting comfortably in my lap.

-- WardCunningham

Thinkpads! Horrors! I still use my company-provided Thinkpad. Every third full moon, for some reason, I try to get all its hardware features working at once. Infra-red, PCMCIA cards, sound, modem, serial and parallel ports, warm docking, 'ultra bay' plastic hard-drive container, external floppy. Three days later I stop foaming at the mouth and have to reinstall the whole damn machine again. Grrr! Why didn't IBM build a machine that would actually work with its operating systems and drivers?? -- RichardEmerson

I don't need a ThinkPad 570 ... I don't need a ThinkPad 570 ... I don't need a ThinkPad 570 ... I don't need a ThinkPad 570 ... --RonJeffries

Hmm... weighing in on the poor destitute student side, I picked up a 701CS second hand about six months ago. The 701 was the last model IBM made with the `butterfly' keyboard design. It's fairly obvious one of the design decisions made here was `small', and indeed I love it for its lack of size; the folding keyboard means I have the same size keyboard as modern machines with literally half the area. It doesn't have a CD-ROM drive; aww. It has an external floppy drive; every time I've used it was for OS installs. It has a wimpy screen, so I can't run X and have to do everything from the command line; again, aww.

All in all, a good machine, I think. But then I run Unix on it, and the install process would be very ... interesting ... without a net connection. -- GrahamHughes

My wife needed a simple, lightweight laptop. I did my research and ended up with the Thinkpad 340. It's a wonderful little machine - the keyboard is 95% the size of a standard laptop keyboard, and the 300 Celleron processor works just fine. Best of all, the thing was cheap: $1500 - and you can now get it even cheaper. A friend took my advice and got one - he's happy. Now I've got laptop envy - I still have an old battle-axe, 10 pounder. -- JoshuaKerievsky

Interesting. I've been running off a mini laptop for 6 years now. Unlike Ward, I spend around 1/2 my time down at the coffee shop or on an airplane, using the battery. With the new Iomega Click disk as my traveling backup device, I only use the floppy to interchange files with colleagues (because those infrared links aren't compatible with each other :-(( . And also unlike Ward, I touch type even the alt-sequences faster than I can move the mouse, so I'm not ready to give up the keyboard.

So what give up? I'd give up the diskette in a flash if they'd get the infrared port software standardized, otherwise get rid of the infrared port.

I would plausibly switch from a keyboard to a stylus with a good daisy pen writing system as the PalmPilot has - I look forward to using that some day.

-- AlistairCockburn

My new employer threw a 390X my way a few weeks back and I love it. But curse the KeyboardDesign?! ...what's with the craaaaazy location of the Fn key (people, that's where a control key is supposed to be!) and the lack of a windows key? ...oh how I lament the ease with which I migrate from elated to complacent.

I remapped control to the key labelled Caps Lock on my Thinkpad 600, and I'm perfectly happy with the setup - perhaps you could find some spare keys to bind to the Windows key (e.g, left control), if you can do that sort of thing in Windows. -- LukeGorrie

CategoryHardware