having hte keyboard open like the hood of a car is absolutely genius design for ease of maintenance. You can have it open to work on, then turn it on briefly to test it, without having to turn it over and throw in screws.
@@ckingpro I'm aware of framework, and while I'm not exactly unhappy with the design, I wouldn't say its necessarily where we should be headed. Mostly, cause while it is standardised to itself, it is not an industry standard, and likely never will be, because it clearly relies on repeat buyers of their ecosystem to be profitable. It's not really the same kind of modularity we had with older swappable components like pc cards, express cards, conventional socketed CPUs, and mobile gpu slots.
It's possible your 3C589 card and PCMCIA slot are fine, the OpenStep/Rhaposody Etherlink III driver works but can't do media detection, so unless you've hard-set some options on the card it won't see the cable. You need to use a DOS setup utility to set the media select in the EEPROM, then it will work. I have a ThinkPad 560E that I run OpenStep4.2 on (It's just like the MacWorld 97 machines!), from which I learned that the hard way. The NetBSD 3c589 driver from 5.1 - the last version that could boot from 2 floppies - can do runtime media selection, but it won't persist through a power cycle. (I think this comment is being eaten by automatic moderation because I put a link to my own findings on this; I've tired to post twice and it keeps not sticking. Trying again without the link.)
So cool! I've got a 760ED buried in storage somewhere... pretty sure I have the external floppy case too! That machine started a life-long ThinkPad obsession. I believe it's on the OpenStep HCL as well. Fun to see some of these "projects" I've been putting off for years come to life on your channel!
A user serviceable, modular laptop in 1997... We've abandoned this to make them "lighter and thinner" as if someone need to put a laptop in his pocket.
To be entirely fair, light laptops are pretty nice. Those late 90s chonkers are too big. But we should have light AND modular AND serviceable laptops, not one or the other. If needed, add *some* width, there's no real need to go ultra thin.
Next time for the "Quirks and features" reference, I would play the ding dong sound from Doug's little intro as well. hahahahahahahaha Maybe even have the dot bounce LOL.
So…since it’s running on an IBM product, and IBM is “Big Blue”….is this “Rhapsody in Blue”? If you used that joke, I haven’t gotten to it in the video yet. 😂
You missed that the keyboard can also tilt up when you open the screen, there are two levers near the top of the keyboard on either side. Depending on how you put the levers you can disable this, which appears to have been done on this laptop.
Absolutely love watching your videos every Saturday, and it was so nice to see you again at the VCF Swap Meet! Can't wait to see what "totally normal" computing shenanigans await you in the future!
Really love this laptop thanks to that! Apple's PowrerBook G3 "Pismo" copied ThinkPad a bit: you could remove the keyboard so easy with no tools and then get access to RAM, HDD and stuff. Maybe you could take away the keyboard on "Lombard" also. It's not about who's best or first. Just wanted to point out that around those years, the laptops were so nice. Thicker yes, but so nice!
Yeah, it's a shame really. Soldering stuff straight to the board to save a few cents but not pass that savings to the customers and all that. Imagine if laptops still had socketed CPUs plus also got GPUs that could be slotted in. It would truly be magnificent.
I saw a few of those Thinkpads when I worked in a laptop shop. Absolute joy to work on. If one of those was broken, it had flown off the roof of a car or something. They were tanks.
About a year ago, I found one of these (or one VERY similar) at a flea market without the power supply. It apparenely came from a local TV station. I pulled the hard drive and looked it over thinking I'd find videos and other TV related things, I didn't. I think It was running windows 95, and was running some type of software that allowed it to work from and store everything on a server.
If memory serves correct, for bootable system Floppys there was a generic internal CD-ROM Driver from ATAPPI, and a generic external CD-ROM Driver from IOMEGA. Both can be found on the system CD installation disc for Norton Ghost.
i have an hp elitebook that opens similarly. just push the switch to remove the back panel and you have access to all the important parts. i wish more laptops incorporated that sort of design.
One should be able to hot swap the cd rom and floppy, there is a switch on the lid when open the bios will switch off circuit and resume when you close the lid
We had a Rasphody OS computer in my house around that time. I think I was the only one who ever used it. I was just a young kid back then, so there wasn't any novelty that I could appreciate.
Another totally pointless obscure OS install on battered hardware. I love it. Thanks for all the late nights that your channel has caused on my bunch of junk ;)
All early ThinkPad's have that design with the flip up keyboard. The designers referred to it as the bento box because they got inspiration from their lunches. So it's not really a quirky but a standard of IBMs of the era. And I think one of the best laptop designs of all time. People give the G3 PowerBook a lot a of credit as being super expandable and easy to work on, it doesn't hold a candle to bento box ThinkPad's. 100% toolless removable of drives, battery, ram and the cmos battery? In 1994? Its one of the easiest laptops to work on from any era.
I played around with Rhapsody a few years ago out of curiosity. It was interesting to get it running on PC hardware but after that, it was essentially useless as there were no apps for it.
Omniweb was slow compared to Netscape navigator back in 1999/2000, I wouldn't hold much hope for it working on modern websites. And I was running this OS on my dev desktop. I noticed there was significant lag in the apps on this laptop which I never had on my desktop machine.
Rhapsody DR2 was great. In hindsight,, Apple were wise to release it as Mac OS X Server 1.x for PowerPc machines, with its rather primitive BlueBox environment for classic Macs, and the native API being so alien compared to what went before, that the likes of Adobe threatened to leave the platform (hence Carbon). For the x86 platform it would have been even worse, with only a handful of of programs .
Your recorded voice sounded like 90s era Steve Jobs presenting the NeXT..... you should repeat the test but now with a "I think I speak for everybody at NeXT saying it's great to be back. ", which of course would be epic on Rhapsody on an IBM Thinkpad, knowing that IBM broke with Apple just before SJ returned, then sold all their PC businesses to Lenovo and then basically left Apple as a siting duck with PowerPC as they switched all their servers to POWER4. There's was even a mythical ThinkPad with a PowerPC 604e that never got off the ground, and Workplace OS (OS/2 6) which was just Mach (with an H) with an OS/2 front end. Supposedly, they would have created a Mac OS 9 UI if everything worked according to plan. Tip: it didn't.
I had back in the days a ThinkPad 365XD with a similar design, but a bit lower end. I remember the CD drive was a CD-ROM drive. It could only read CD-ROM and not burned CD-R, at all.
This is amazing. I had such high hopes for Rhapsody at the time. Was so disappointed that it didn't develop into a real product for PCs. Although, in retrospect, what did I expect it to actually be? 🤷♂️
Ive owned several older thinkpads, great machines, built like tanks, and still look like a fairly modern design, if I had more room id collect working ones. Older Thinkpads were interestingly designed, quite a clever design feature of older thinkpads it they pulled some air through the keyboard for cross component cooling. they should bring that back with modern laptops.
Great video. I used your image at Macintosh Garden to put on Virtual PC 5. But trying to change the resolution and it's asking for root password. What is it, or how can I change it? I indend to get a ThinkPad on eBay or maybe a Powermac G3 to run Rhapsody, what has been your best experience (ThinkPad looks like you enjoyed it with the sound recording you made). Thanks,
