Buying and using a laptop - articles, tips and advice

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IBM ThinkPad - The End of an Era?

ThinkPad is the brand name for an incredibly successful range of portable laptop and notebook computers originally designed and sold by IBM. Most of us who have traveled across continents on behalf of our employers have had our hands on one of these at some time or another. If you haven’t you probably wished you had such was the reputation for reliability and the user friendliness of these machines. Since early 2005 the ThinkPad range has been manufactured and marketed by Lenovo, which purchased the IBM PC division. And life on the road will never be the same again.The ThinkPad range was introduced at Comdex 1992. Traditionally black in color, the ThinkPad’s design innovations were numerous. They included features such as the magnesium or titanium composite body, the TrackPoint pointing device that allows the performance near that of a mouse, the ThinkLight, an LED keyboard light put on the top of the LCD screen, solidly constructed full size keyboard (including fold-out butterfly keyboards on the later 701 models), the Active Protection System, a device that detects when a ThinkPad is falling and shuts the hard drive down to prevent damage, biometric fingerprint reader, dual wireless antennae that allow for more stable connections, and the Client Security Solution that allows for industry standard TPM encryption and password management to counter key logger spyware. ThinkPads have a reputation for being very solidly built and dependable. In fact the IBM ThinkPad was probably the laptop equivalent of a BMW or a Mercedes quality at a price. It almost said for anyone that used one, “Look at me, look how my company values me, I’ve got a ThinkPad!”

Design History-The Japanese lunchbox that inspired the ThinkPad design

At the start of the Nineties, Tom Hardy, corporate manager of the IBM Design Program met with an Italian-based designer called Richard Sapper (Richard was later to go on to design a ballpoint for Lamy) and Kazuhiko Yamazaki, one of the notebook designers at IBM's Design Center in Japan. Sapper proposed a design inspired by the Shōkadō bentō, a traditional black-lacquered Japanese lunch box. So the famous all black look was born. IBM launched the ThimkPad line in 1992 with the ThinkPad 700. Many people don't realize that the original ThinkPad was actually not a laptop at all, but a tablet computer. It didn’t have a keyboard; instead it featured a monochrome LCD screen, 40 MB flash memory (instead of hard disk), with a handwriting recognizer from IBM. The keyboard version with Microsoft Windows 3.1 was next and sold for over US$4,000, weighed 3 kg (6.5 lb), and had dimensions of 2.2 by 11.7 by 8.3 inches (56 by 297 by 210 mm). It featured a 10.4 inch (264 mm) LCD (the largest at that time), a 25 MHz 486SLC processor, a 120 MB (yes, megabyte) hard disk drive, and the easy-to-use keyboard featuring the signature TrackPoint pointing device. The thinking behind the bright red TrackPoint, embedded in the keyboard, was that it would enable the laptop to be used on an airline tray table without a mouse.

What’s in a name?

The ThinkPad name was supposedly inspired by the leather-bound pocket notebooks issued to all IBM employees with the corporate motto 'Think' embossed on the cover. Incredibly, IBM’s corporate naming team was dead against using the ThinkPad name at first, because all the previous IBM desktop computers were referred to by model numbers! However, sanity prevailed when the popularity of the ThinkPad brand with the press became clear. This brand recognition was what finally convinced IBM to retain the name.

Will there be life after ThinkPad?

Since the sale of the IBM PC division to Lenovo, many companies have dropped the “ThinkPad” .I use quotes because although Lenovo make ThinkPads and have done for some time, the brand is so inextricably linked to IBM that, well it just doesn’t seem like the same laptop! Of course there has been some well publicized parting of the ways, like the US government for example. It’s not something I can judge for sure until my current IBM ThinkPad gets replaced by my new Lenovo ThinkPad in November. One thing is for sure, you know a piece of equipment has reached unassailable greatness when you hear a conversation like the one I heard in a hotel bar in Copenhagen between two seasoned road warriors, “ …those old IBM ThinkPads, nothing could touch them man, when I gave mine back it was like losing a friend…”