Yeah I did not finish this… idk if this is anything interesting. But i hate seeing drafts, so lemme know if i should do anything about it?
Off Topic Tangent – The ThinkPad Model Line
- Flagship 700, 720, 750, 755, 760, 765, 770, 600
- Pen Tablet 700, 710, 730, Misc Industrial Models
- Pen Convertible 750P, 360P
- Budget 300, 350, 360, 355, 340, 370, 345, 365, 380, 385, 310, 390, iSeries
- Portable 550, 500, 555, 510, 530, 535, 560, 570
- UltraPortable 220, 230, 235, 240
- PowerPC RS/6000 N40, 820, 850, 860
- Minis 701, PC110
In Japan, IBM teamed up with Canon to develop a laptop with a built in bubble jet printer, the 550BJ. The machine was released in Japan in January 1993 and cost a hefty 454,00 Yen or $3,914 USD. It was only intended to be sold in East Asian markets, but would still be imported. The machine weighed about 7 pounds, it used a similar sized LCD of the 700 but weighed more & was larger due to the integrated printer. When you printed you loaded up the paper below the keyboard, it flipped open like a car hood. This feature IBM would later utilize for hardware maintenance & upgrades on some ThinkPads. You would load up the paper from there and it would print out in the rear. Canon would make their own version of this machine called the NoteJet & have several iterations of them. I believe the IBM version came out first, but the UK Computing History site has a date of 1992, unsure if it’s a misc trademark or copyright for a Canon NoteJet BN120C… The 550BJ would not come with a trackpoint, it required a mouse to be plugged in, the following model 555BJ did have an integrated TrackPoint. Both systems I believe are based upon the older AT architecture.
I collect IBM thinkpads. I have hundreds of them. I’m constantly trying to get my head around the various different competing early ideas, designs, labs, prototypes, etc and I really appreciate Parts 1 – 3 in being the *only* source I can find (including in print) that tries to marry all the key components in the machine – designs, names, advancing technology, dead ends, etc…
So I really hope you get around to a part 4 as weird joint ventures (such as the 555BJ or the Transnote) are really interesting missing chunks, which would really put the cherry on the cake! Also late oddballs like the Z50, S30 or G40 would be good mentions and perhaps how they informed ranges such as the X series.