I recently upgraded from my old laptop to a ThinkPad. I'd heard for years about just how good ThinkPads were, and had actually considered buying one at a couple points in the past (and not just because I'm an IBM fanboy). I've been using my P15v for just under a week as I'm writing this, and I love it. But that's not what I actually want this page to be about. Instead, I want to talk about all the cool things = that thinkpads have been doing since 1992.
Laptop Genesis for IBM
Let's start with the ThinkPad 700 and 700c, these were the first machines that were called ThinkPads from the very start (the 700T tablet was a hasty rebrand from it's previous name and model number to be more coherent with the smash hit that was the ThinkPad 700, and the 300 series machines were launched just after the 700's).
These laptops had a couple innovations. First off, they were all black! If you've seen a certain iMac commercial you'll know that most machines in the eighties and early nineties were off white to light grey in color, and this wasn't a coincidence, or style trend. The German DIN standards organization had set a requirement for the color of computer hardware that required machines to be in a certain color range to reduce eyestrain (this standard was based on a very bad study that was later disproven, primarily because IBM payed for independent studies to verify its claims). Since West Germany was such a massive computer market (IBM in particular made a lot of their money just in germany, let alone the rest of europe), most computer manufacturers heeded the DIN's standards, and made light colored machines. Making an all black computer was a real innovation from IBM in the PC market, and that iconic color scheme really set the ThinkPad apart, especially early on.
The other major innovation of the first thinkpad was its pointing device. It may be hard to think of the TrackPoint as an innovative ThinkPad feature now that it's so deeply ingrained into the product line (there's less than a dozen models that don't have one), but for the very first ThinkPad it really was a massive innovation. Other portables (like those from apple) had pointing devices, but they were usually trackballs, which are bulky, and about as reliable as ball mice (which we stopped using for a reason). The ThinkPad's trackpoint (also an unusual color for IBM hardware of the time, as most input devices were expected to be blue under IBM's common color scheme) was a highly innovative design, it served the function of moving a cursor almost as well (some say better) than a traditional mouse, but being integrated into the keyboard meant that the time between typing and cursor selection was cut in half. This change may seem minor, but over hundreds of hours of working those half seconds of convenience every time you need to move the cursor add up quick. And if you think the market dominance of trackpads today proves the TrackPoint isn't as good, you'd be mistaken. everyone wanted to use a TrackPoint early on, but IBM held onto its patents too closely for anyone to really make something that kept up with the TrackPoint. And since trackpads were something anyone could add to their laptops, and worked almost as well, they ended up taking over.
The last truly innovative thing about the thinkpad was its clamshell design with the hinge at the very back of the case. Despite portables dating all the way back to the early parts of the 80's, laptops were still in their infancy, the thinkpads were one of the very first laptops by IBM in the form factor we think of today, with their earlier portables not really following a single design shape. When Apple's Powerbook line, and the IBM ThinkPad launched around the same time in the early nineties (and the thinkpad made IBM half a billion dollars), it did a lot to set down the exact form factor that portables would take to come, with a simple book-like clamshel design, and no akward back end sticking out behind the screen.
Metamorphasis
I'm going to keep this one brief, because you can find plenty about all this on other people's websites, YouTube, and venerable ol' Wikipedia. The 701c is one hell of a laptop design... and it was also a complete mess for IBM to produce.
The 701c existed to solve a problem. The biggest LCDs of the time were a bit too small for a full sized keyboard. so either you would have bezels the size of the english channel, or make your laptop's keyboard unusable. If you wanted to make a small machine, you had to give it a small keyboard, usually an unusably small keyboard.
The 701c solved this with a now famous "Butterfly" keyboard design, that would slide two halves of the keyboard past each other as the device opened to allow for a full sized keyboard in a subnotebook laptop body.
Though the 701c was an innovative design, it had a lot of trouble in its development. first off, its design schedule was tight. The machine was a 486, and IBM knew that if it was going to be a success it would have to ship before pentium machines (and larger displays) were available. Its design may have been a genius solution to a problem, but that problem was going to stop existing on its own very soon. Due to its rushed development, the design staff had to work a lot of overtime.
The other issue with the 701c was its production run. ThinkPads had a tendency to be underproduced at the time, often failing to hold up to demand for the laptops, even though IBM knew that the 701c was going to be a niche product, the level of hype around its innovative design, and the pressure to not fall behind possible demand led to IBM overproducing the model, which came to be a problem when the laptop was discontinued the same year it was launched.
Because of the difficulty in designing the machine, and the fast pace of technology in the nineties, the 701c barely launched early enough to have a receptive market. and pentium machines launched later the same year. IBM knew that even with its award winning keyboard, it wouldn't keep selling. Since they had overproduced initially, they had to cut the price on the machines to keep selling them, and in the end likely didn't make much money off the laptop. The 701c stopped production the same year as it was released.
Bright Idea
The ThinkLight was an innovation in seeing your keyboard. before the "fashionable" gamer-ish backlit keyboards that are all over today's laptops. The thinklight used a standard keyboard with no integrated lighting element, instead placing the light in the top bezel, near the camera. At any time you were a simple key combo away from having a light to shine down on both your keyboard, and your workspace. The thinklight was a good innovation, but in the end backlit keyboards won out. Which makes enough sense. Just shining an LED down at the keyboard probably felt a bit too hack-ey, and switching to chiclet style keyboards allowed for easier integration of backlights into ThinkPad keyboards.
Changing Hands
This paragraph is all history lesson, so buckle in.
by 2005 the PC market had undercut its prices by so much that IBM's expensive and high quality machines couldn't compete. They had been losing money for years, and already spun off or sold off their other secondary business units (like PC peripherals). PCs were never IBM's core business, that was (and still is) mainframe computers. So when it stopped making money, IBM stopped trying to hold onto it. Lenovo, a chinese company that was very new stepped up with an offer to buy IBM's laptop division. Specifically the ThinkPad line.
Some looks through the history of ThinkPad don't really get the full picture on this buyout. When Lenovo bought IBM's PC division, it basically functioned as a reverse takeover. Lenovo moved its headquarters to the US, and took on key IBM staff from the PC division in the same roles they'd had before. (If you look at the resume of anyone important to ThinkPad today, there's a strong chance they have both IBM and lenovo listed as employers). This resulted mostly in the same people, doing the same jobs, in the same buildings as before, with little more changing than the letterhead. It was only at the very top levels that ThinkPad machines were being made by "different people". What this means is that ThinkPad mostly carried on as before, which allowed not just for the same attention to quality and durability as before, but also that same creative bent that made thinkpads really stand out.
More coming soon!
expect this page to have more info on cool thinkpad features in the future once I feel more comfortable discussing them in depth. Thinkpad laptops have a long history of innovations and I definitely haven't covered all of them yet.