10 ms·

ThinkPad 560E

181 points by djsumdog 6y ago

calvinmorrison 6y ago
Imagine using a computer for, I don't know... Work or something. Typing a letter? Spreadsheets? Tax software, not taking. Seems like you could do all that and more on this.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Certainly with 80MB of memory you could do all that and more. This machine is more capable in most respects than the machine that was on my desk when that was supposedly a scientific workstation. With 80MB this laptop can easily run Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, almost anything.
ptrincr 6y ago
I first heard of openstep from this brilliant post yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588 ... and here it pops up again.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Not just OpenStep, but Rhapsody! It was Apple's original transition plan for Mac OS X, basically OpenStep/Mach 5.x with a Mac OS 8-style Platinum UI done in NeXT-style Display PostScript complete with draggable menus. It's my favorite Apple product of all time just for the "what could have been" factor, but the Adobes of the world balked at "rewrite your apps in Yellow Box" so we got Carbon and friends in the rebooted Mac OS X project. There was one retail release as "Mac OS X Server 1.0", but the "Premier" desktop-user-focused version was canceled. I like to run Rhapsody on my Power Mac G3 Blue&White because that particular machine shipped with Rhapsody (in a Server G3 configuration) and is extremely well supported: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-20130909.png https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-201... And here are some good starting points for more info: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) http://rhapsodyos.org/ http://rhapsodyos.org/
  - zymhan 6y ago
    I had no idea Rhapsody OS existed! I really want to give the Mac OS Server 1.0 a spin on a PPC machine!
- protomyth 6y ago
  It was actually fun to use. I had NeXTSTEP 3.3 and then 4.x with the developer tools back in 95. I was in love with PostScript and Objective-C so this was my favorite computer. I had it running on a custom Pentium 90mhz system. It was so easy to process data on that thing.
  - jasomill 6y ago
    I agree! Circa 1998, I got a tip from a friend in university IT and "rescued" a few NeXTstations and associated peripherals (displays, mice, keyboards) from an Indiana University dumpster. I emailed NeXT, and they were nice enough to send me complete software kits for both NeXTSTEP 3.3 and OPENSTEP 4.2 (all platforms) at no charge. The monochrome displays, in particular, were lovely, and, in spite of its outdated CPU (25MHz 040 IIRC), one of these machines, running NeXTSTEP 3.3, was my primary workstation for terminal-centric work for the next couple years. While I never did get much into Objective-C beyond the basics, as a big PostScript fan since the red/green/blue book days, I did have a bit of fun with Display PostScript (and NeWS on the SPARCstation 1 the NeXTstation ultimately shared a desk with, although, quite unlike the NeXTstation, the Sun was nearly unusably slow for day-to-day GUI use).
    - mattl 6y ago
      Circa 98 that would have been Apple, which is interesting but not unbelievable at all.
    - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
      Similar story. I was walking through the Physics building at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2004 and a brilliant looking black cube of a computer caught my eye. It was lined up along a wall with a bunch of drab, old computer equipment destined for the trash heap. This was before the era of web-connected phones, so I quickly peeked at the back sticker for some information (model, serial, etc.) and went back to my dorm and looked up what it could be. It was a NeXTcube, which I had never known about. So I hustled back with an empty backpack and managed to cram it in with the zippers barely holding it in and walked back to my dorm. Once I got back and took it apart and was amazed at the quality. I never booted it up, but I kept it for a year or so before selling it on eBay to a person named Chuck (vintagecomputermuseum) for $300. I really should check-in with them and see if they ever got it up and running.
ferros 6y ago
On a slightly related note, fun tip. If you have a ‘dead’ laptop or mobile phone battery that’s too dead to even recharge.. I have ‘jumpstarted’ some by connecting to a li-ion cordless drill battery for a few minutes. I’ve managed to get a few old mobile phones back to life using this method. Edit: as a safety note this is not recommended! Please read some of the comments below!
- roland35 6y ago
  I believe this can work but please be careful doing this! Tool batteries are capable of supplying very high peak current and could cause a small fire. Lithium ion battery fires are not trivial, water alone may not be enough to stop it.
  - ferros 6y ago
    Good point - I didn’t add a disclaimer, not recommended! And probably not a fun tip but nonetheless saved my bacon a few times when I needed quick access to devices.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  This is, in general, a bad idea. Lithium battery charge circuits generally have a fully charged voltage (about 4.2v), a fully discharged voltage (about 3.2v), and a 'do not attempt to recharge below this' voltage (about 2.4v). The reason circuits are designed not to recharge a cell below the 2.4v threshold is because when you recharge below that voltage, gasses are typically generated which eventually (many months later usually) burst the plastic envelope of the battery, and the battery electrolyte then evaporates as a highly flammable gas, killing the battery and potentially starting a fire if there is a nearby ignition source. TL:DR:. 'dead' batteries refuse to charge for safety reasons, and tricks to bypass that safety mechanism might lead to a fire a few months down the line.
  - ferros 6y ago
    Appreciate the explanation, not information that’s readily found when you search explanations on dead batteries.
paulmd 6y ago
mSATA to IDE adapters in a ‘2.5” replacement’ are widely available and I’d prefer those to a SD card adapter over concerns about wear leveling.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
KC8ZKF 6y ago
Five or six years ago, I bought a lot of three ThinkPad R40 Celerons sold for parts, hoping to get one useable machine. I did, ending up with a rather pedestrian LXDE Linux laptop. Just this week I got a second one running with a whopping 256 MB of RAM, and put OS/2 (ArcaOS) on it. It’s quite a snappy machine. Loads of fun.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Is it a collector thing? Do you use it or was it a fun project and now it’s idle?
  - KC8ZKF 6y ago
    I’m just playing. It will probably be idle before too long. The Linux box was used in anger for a couple of years.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- asveikau 6y ago
  I had an r40 from 2003-2006. Shipped with XP, then I put Linux and later OpenBSD. I had to stop using it when the GPU soldering came loose. (I was able to fix it with a heat gun the first time. For a while. Then I gave up.)
- h2odragon 6y ago
  I had an R40 run as a router / home server for 12 years, until this January. Lovely machines. https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-beginning.html#cracktop https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-beginning.html#cracktop
  - abhijat 6y ago
    Its not quite low end but I use a T480 with ubuntu as a home server for plex etc. I set it up to boot from the ACPI signal and run with lid closed so it boots from the wall switch.
nomdep 6y ago
I had one of those almost 20 years ago. It was already old by then so I install BeOS on it and used it for a while to play movies. Now I regret that I got rid of it when it didn't boot. :(
projektfu 6y ago
I had a 560X (233MHz Pentium MMX) that I loved. I was really into Squeak at the time and did a lot of hacking with it. The keyboard eventually fell apart, so I was surprised he found a usable one.
twoodfin 6y ago
I’d love to hear the modern “Be would have been better” case. Apple’s purchase / reverse acquisition of NeXT seems so obviously correct in retrospect. Didn’t Steve Jobs carry around a ThinkPad running OpenStep (later Rhapsody?) the first few years he was back at Apple?
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Would they have done much worse with BeOs though?
- efficax 6y ago
  I think it might have been worth abandoning unix for a different paradigm. BeOS is one way that could have gone.. Even better I wish that plan9 had been taken as the basis of an OS with the backing of a big firm like Apple and serious commitment to developing it. (alas!)
- PAPPPmAc 6y ago
  (Author chiming in, you've given me an opportunity for one of my favorite sport-arguments) I'll admit that even Jean-Louis Gassée (Former Mac head, Be founder) later said NeXT+Steve was the right choice (see: https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-jobss-next-over-my-beos/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-... ) - though he said it for personal reasons based on his contempt for Apple's management. Some not-carefully-composed points of argument that Be might have been the right choice, because I like doing it for sport: BeOS was truly a ground-up creation, OpenStep was a Display PostScript environment largely licensed from Adobe running on a hacked-up Mach with some BSD pieces pulled inside the kernel boundary to make performance acceptable (this is XNU, the kernel Apple still uses in everything). That had two points for Be - Apple had to replace the whole display layer, partly for licensing cost reasons and partly because developers weren't interested in dealing with the "Yellow Box" OpenStep API or being stuck in the "Blue Box" legacy compatibility jail. Equally or more important, BeOS was vastly more performant on the same hardware - doing the "the UI stays responsive while I'm playing a dozen media files back on this shitty Pentum MMX" stunt was always a blast around the turn of the century. BeOS was also naively SMP with a nifty and mostly pleasant thread model that has some advantages (and annoyances) over the dominant event loop way of things, but always remained responsive, while Apple inherited the spinning beach ball from NeXT. For another big technical point that history actually agrees with me on, OpenStep used a passable UFS implementation (that Apple reverted to HFS+, which was already getting long in the tooth in the late 90s, apparently largely because Adobe wouldn't get their shit together to make their products run on a case-sensitive FS...), but BeFS was lovely in ways we're finally getting elsewhere 20+ years later - exactly so in fact, Apple eventually hired Dominic Giampaolo who designed BeFS to design APFS, and it really shows. BeOS was also already suited for semi-embedded applications, both in various commercial multimedia gadgets, and also the BeIA internet appliance stuff. Since the bulk of modern NextStep-family devices are phones and tablets, there's no reason to think a Gasse/Be Apple wouldn't have thrived in this environment (I know, Palm borrowed Be parts for Palm OS Cobalt and didn't do well, but maybe they were already doomed by that time). Also, Be was _profoundly_ personal, looking toward a "everyone has their own WebServer running their personal services" kind of future, rather than the "Everyone back into the ~~mainframe~~ major cloud provider" future we got, and I can't help but thinking having one of the big industry players not in the roach-motel platform game would have been good for society. Jobs did in fact use a ThinkPad running OpenStep/Rhapsody builds around the time of the NeXT-buys-Apple-with-Apple's-Money situation. It was a 560 (not E), there is a NextComputers forum thread about it where Marc J. Driftmeyer who set up the machine Steve had at Macworld '97 talks about it http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0 http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0 .
smilekzs 6y ago
I had a 600E! It was my very first laptop, and I learned Flash 4 (of Macromedia era) on it. It stood out so much against its contemporaries and made me a ThinkPad fan to this day.
- nicklaf 6y ago
  In high school I ran Plan 9 on a 600E I found on ebay. The specs were plenty fast enough to run the fourth edition of Plan 9, which hadn't gotten any slower since the early 90s... and Bell Labs had thoroughly worked out the driver kinks on that machine. I was even able to join wifi networks through the PCMCIA card, which was also supported by Plan 9. Pretty fun to be running a fully graphical Unix successor on native hardware with what probably is a fraction of SLOC compared to most stripped down embedded Linux systems you'll find today. When something went south you could just peak at the kernel source code, and even on a Pentium II it would compile the changed objects in less than a minute! And not even knowing C that well at the time, I made several functional changes to the system. I can't imagine being that cavalier on Linux today over a decade later.... To this day I'm not sure I've used a laptop that has as nice a form factor. Especially wonderful was the tactile feel of the keyboard.
byw 6y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been a spiritual successor of the original ThinkPads from a premium small-scale producer in Shenzhen (that I'm aware of), given the amount of niche mom & pop phone/PC producers over there. (I know there's a company that puts new chips in old chassis, but it'd be great to see new chassis from scratch as well).
- phonon 6y ago
  Huawei MateBook X Pro?
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    Seems to be lacking a lot of what made the old thinkpads great in comparison to modern laptops like repairability, great keyboard, ruggedness, matte screens, great linux support, etc. The matebook x pro seems more like just another modern ultrabook.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      After taking a look myself, I agree with the above -- it looks like a wannabe MacBook. Hell, the name "matebook x" even implies not-quite-Macbook. Which is exactly what the old school Thinkpads are not.
- nikanj 6y ago
  GPD Pocket et al?
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  How I'd love to see something like classic ThinkPads again: completely self-serviceable and upgradeable with plenty of parts and lots of support available. So sick of glue and crazy proprietary chips and boards.
  - close04 6y ago
    Hardware became a commodity over the past 2-3 decades. It gets replaced, not serviced. And most people got used to not caring about getting something serviced beyond a few consumables (like a battery). It's hard to stay afloat selling to a niche so not many companies try. On the other hand the pace of evolution has slowed down and upgrading stuff is less of a necessity today. So most people no longer feel the need to pay for flexibility, they'll go for other things like design, thinness, weight, etc. Phones probably showed the way, they became the ubiquitous computing device and for anyone born in this era they simply set the standard fro all other devices. I miss my ThinkPad 600x for example but not necessarily because I could (and did) tear it down and build it back over and over again. But also because it seems today we're sacrificing a bit too much for the sake of design. Like impossible to use keyboards, lack of ports, everything glued, etc. because anything else will make the device a bit thicker or heavier.
DonHopkins 6y ago
>It didn’t come with a cap on the TrackPoint, so I swiped a proper “classic dome” from the spares that came with my T60p to make everything period correct (aside: why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are cheap and everywhere). I still don’t care for Trackpoints, but it has cachet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 >Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2] or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written up and published the story. [3] >[...] >Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares! >He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.
- touisteur 6y ago
  Oh how I'll miss my hands never leaving the keyboard when I have to give up my T430 for another brand... Ted Selker be blessed.
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    Those patents must be due to expire soon if they haven’t already. Maybe system76 can save us?
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      In order for System76 to save us, Clevo would have to save us, first (since the former sells rebranded laptops manufactured by the latter, last I checked). Dell and HP already offer TrackPoint-equivalents on their Latitudes/Precisions and EliteBooks (respectively) and have been doing so for more than a decade now, so it seems the patents are definitely expired. I feel like the IBM/Lenovo version is higher-quality, though.
mng2 6y ago
I operated a 570 for a few years, back around 2006. I don't remember how I decided to get one, but it could run Win2K, my preferred OS at the time, and had a USB port. At the time I was doing most of my work through SSH and X sessions... Firefox ran but it was slow. I remember sending the original battery pack off to get rebuilt -- they probably weren't expecting such an antique!
mysterypie 6y ago
> It was listed as “No HDD” which was visibly a lie because this thing still has its screw cover stickers intact I’m trying to understand why anyone would lie about not having a hard disk. Is there some rule on the auction website that hard disks must have been removed or wiped?
- p_l 6y ago
  Seller not knowing combined with common approach of removing hard drives to either sell separately or because of data wiping. The CMOS battery error could have confused the final seller. It's quite often that such finds come through multiple hands, and by the time it hits eBay/whatever the seller has no idea what they are selling except maybe for what's written on labels and can be decided in 5 minutes from looking at the wares :) That's how I bought my (former now) AlphaStation 255/233, I noticed the case being sold as "old server case for use as HTPC" :)
  - PAPPPmAc 6y ago
    This. Goodwill's policy is, AFIK, a "reasonable measures to wipe" so once they saw it fail to POST and no obvious HDD caddy they just listed.
neilv 6y ago
I didn't imagine seeing a post about the 560E on HN, :) but here's some vintage Linux support and hardware notes: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ If you can't find replacement batteries, and you're willing to do the research to make sure you do it safely, you might be able to put new cells in an old battery. Since (IIRC) you'll probably need PCMCIA for WiFi anyway, rather than getting past mini-PCIe allowlisting, there's less motivation to bring up Coreboot on it. But you could try. https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/ The 560E was a fine machine, and probably close to the last best ThinkPad. A few ThinkPad models later, when I moved to the T60, I didn't like the T60 as much, including the keyboard and fit&finish. Still, today I transplant original T60 keyboards into somewhat newer ThinkPads (since, in the generation after the T60, the keyboard backing started flexing too much, and also, the key action otherwise doesn't seem as reliable). Another reason to find original T60 keyboards is that a lot of the new replacement keyboard parts now are very low-quality counterfeits, e.g., bad key action, and requiring multiple presses of a TrackPoint button to get one to register, on a new unit. (So bad, that cleaning 20 years of strangers' crumbs and dandruff out of an original keyboard starts to seem like even more of an attractive idea.)
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"Initially the battery was reporting itself dead, as you would expect for a 23 year old battery. On a whim I tried the “briefly near-short the battery with a continuity tester in both directions and see if it will take a charge” thing while I was probing to see if it showed any potential (it did, around 6v) – I got lucky, not only did it not catch fire, the original battery now charges to “full” and holds a nontrivial charge, it claims an hour or two in the battery meter which isn’t far from original claimed endurance." Interesting! A technique for reviving (well, enough to boot and run!) apparently dead laptop batteries... I did not know this was possible!
- PAPPPmAc 6y ago
  It is neither reliable nor guaranteed safe. I have an MSEE and can't explain to my own satisfaction why it sometimes works. The only thing I've read that makes sense is that it resets the protection circuitry after an undervoltage or other lock-out event.
ubermonkey 6y ago
Wow. I had a 560Z, which was the same form factor but with different options. I'm completely unsurprised that some still exist in great shape, because those machines were insanely overengineered. Mine showed no real wear after 2.5 years of daily use including no small amount of travel, and by that point it had stopped being appealing as a work platform. It was actually my last daily-driver Windows machine. I was working mostly in Office apps at the time, and Win95/98 was just GARBAGE on a laptop. You couldn't reliably sleep. It crashed all the time. Eventually, it drove me to buy a Mac, based on the experiences of one of my business partners. This was pre-OSX, so the OS was only about 30% more stable than Win95, but sleep worked EVERY TIME, and the whole system was more responsive. Then the dot-com crash happened, and OS X happened, and I went back to coding as a solo act. But I sure have fond memories of that 560Z.
awiesenhofer 6y ago
Wow, I never thought of seeing the 560E on the frontpage of HN. I still have mine to play old win9x and DOS games. Runs Windows 98SE perfectly, on its original HDD and is still just a joy to use. Had to transfer most of my old games to it via IrDA, long before i finally bought a USB PCMCIA-Card. Never had the external floppy drive though...

181 points by djsumdog 6y ago

Imagine using a computer for, I don't know... Work or something. Typing a letter? Spreadsheets? Tax software, not taking. Seems like you could do all that and more on this.

jeffbee 6y ago
Certainly with 80MB of memory you could do all that and more. This machine is more capable in most respects than the machine that was on my desk when that was supposedly a scientific workstation. With 80MB this laptop can easily run Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, almost anything.

ptrincr 6y ago

I first heard of openstep from this brilliant post yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091588 ... and here it pops up again.

Lammy 6y ago
Not just OpenStep, but Rhapsody! It was Apple's original transition plan for Mac OS X, basically OpenStep/Mach 5.x with a Mac OS 8-style Platinum UI done in NeXT-style Display PostScript complete with draggable menus. It's my favorite Apple product of all time just for the "what could have been" factor, but the Adobes of the world balked at "rewrite your apps in Yellow Box" so we got Carbon and friends in the rebooted Mac OS X project. There was one retail release as "Mac OS X Server 1.0", but the "Premier" desktop-user-focused version was canceled. I like to run Rhapsody on my Power Mac G3 Blue&White because that particular machine shipped with Rhapsody (in a Server G3 configuration) and is extremely well supported: https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-20130909.png https://cooltrainer.org/images/original/michiru-rhapsody-201... And here are some good starting points for more info: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) http://rhapsodyos.org/ http://rhapsodyos.org/
- zymhan 6y ago
  I had no idea Rhapsody OS existed! I really want to give the Mac OS Server 1.0 a spin on a PPC machine!
protomyth 6y ago
It was actually fun to use. I had NeXTSTEP 3.3 and then 4.x with the developer tools back in 95. I was in love with PostScript and Objective-C so this was my favorite computer. I had it running on a custom Pentium 90mhz system. It was so easy to process data on that thing.
- jasomill 6y ago
  I agree! Circa 1998, I got a tip from a friend in university IT and "rescued" a few NeXTstations and associated peripherals (displays, mice, keyboards) from an Indiana University dumpster. I emailed NeXT, and they were nice enough to send me complete software kits for both NeXTSTEP 3.3 and OPENSTEP 4.2 (all platforms) at no charge. The monochrome displays, in particular, were lovely, and, in spite of its outdated CPU (25MHz 040 IIRC), one of these machines, running NeXTSTEP 3.3, was my primary workstation for terminal-centric work for the next couple years. While I never did get much into Objective-C beyond the basics, as a big PostScript fan since the red/green/blue book days, I did have a bit of fun with Display PostScript (and NeWS on the SPARCstation 1 the NeXTstation ultimately shared a desk with, although, quite unlike the NeXTstation, the Sun was nearly unusably slow for day-to-day GUI use).
  - mattl 6y ago
    Circa 98 that would have been Apple, which is interesting but not unbelievable at all.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
    Similar story. I was walking through the Physics building at the University of Maryland in the summer of 2004 and a brilliant looking black cube of a computer caught my eye. It was lined up along a wall with a bunch of drab, old computer equipment destined for the trash heap. This was before the era of web-connected phones, so I quickly peeked at the back sticker for some information (model, serial, etc.) and went back to my dorm and looked up what it could be. It was a NeXTcube, which I had never known about. So I hustled back with an empty backpack and managed to cram it in with the zippers barely holding it in and walked back to my dorm. Once I got back and took it apart and was amazed at the quality. I never booted it up, but I kept it for a year or so before selling it on eBay to a person named Chuck (vintagecomputermuseum) for $300. I really should check-in with them and see if they ever got it up and running.

ferros 6y ago

On a slightly related note, fun tip. If you have a ‘dead’ laptop or mobile phone battery that’s too dead to even recharge.. I have ‘jumpstarted’ some by connecting to a li-ion cordless drill battery for a few minutes. I’ve managed to get a few old mobile phones back to life using this method. Edit: as a safety note this is not recommended! Please read some of the comments below!

roland35 6y ago
I believe this can work but please be careful doing this! Tool batteries are capable of supplying very high peak current and could cause a small fire. Lithium ion battery fires are not trivial, water alone may not be enough to stop it.
- ferros 6y ago
  Good point - I didn’t add a disclaimer, not recommended! And probably not a fun tip but nonetheless saved my bacon a few times when I needed quick access to devices.
londons_explore 6y ago
This is, in general, a bad idea. Lithium battery charge circuits generally have a fully charged voltage (about 4.2v), a fully discharged voltage (about 3.2v), and a 'do not attempt to recharge below this' voltage (about 2.4v). The reason circuits are designed not to recharge a cell below the 2.4v threshold is because when you recharge below that voltage, gasses are typically generated which eventually (many months later usually) burst the plastic envelope of the battery, and the battery electrolyte then evaporates as a highly flammable gas, killing the battery and potentially starting a fire if there is a nearby ignition source. TL:DR:. 'dead' batteries refuse to charge for safety reasons, and tricks to bypass that safety mechanism might lead to a fire a few months down the line.
- ferros 6y ago
  Appreciate the explanation, not information that’s readily found when you search explanations on dead batteries.

paulmd 6y ago

mSATA to IDE adapters in a ‘2.5” replacement’ are widely available and I’d prefer those to a SD card adapter over concerns about wear leveling.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

KC8ZKF 6y ago

Five or six years ago, I bought a lot of three ThinkPad R40 Celerons sold for parts, hoping to get one useable machine. I did, ending up with a rather pedestrian LXDE Linux laptop. Just this week I got a second one running with a whopping 256 MB of RAM, and put OS/2 (ArcaOS) on it. It’s quite a snappy machine. Loads of fun.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Is it a collector thing? Do you use it or was it a fun project and now it’s idle?
- KC8ZKF 6y ago
  I’m just playing. It will probably be idle before too long. The Linux box was used in anger for a couple of years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
asveikau 6y ago
I had an r40 from 2003-2006. Shipped with XP, then I put Linux and later OpenBSD. I had to stop using it when the GPU soldering came loose. (I was able to fix it with a heat gun the first time. For a while. Then I gave up.)
h2odragon 6y ago
I had an R40 run as a router / home server for 12 years, until this January. Lovely machines. https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-beginning.html#cracktop https://snafuhall.com/home-lan-1-the-beginning.html#cracktop
- abhijat 6y ago
  Its not quite low end but I use a T480 with ubuntu as a home server for plex etc. I set it up to boot from the ACPI signal and run with lid closed so it boots from the wall switch.

nomdep 6y ago

I had one of those almost 20 years ago. It was already old by then so I install BeOS on it and used it for a while to play movies. Now I regret that I got rid of it when it didn't boot. :(

projektfu 6y ago

I had a 560X (233MHz Pentium MMX) that I loved. I was really into Squeak at the time and did a lot of hacking with it. The keyboard eventually fell apart, so I was surprised he found a usable one.

twoodfin 6y ago

I’d love to hear the modern “Be would have been better” case. Apple’s purchase / reverse acquisition of NeXT seems so obviously correct in retrospect. Didn’t Steve Jobs carry around a ThinkPad running OpenStep (later Rhapsody?) the first few years he was back at Apple?

andromeduck 6y ago
Would they have done much worse with BeOs though?
efficax 6y ago
I think it might have been worth abandoning unix for a different paradigm. BeOS is one way that could have gone.. Even better I wish that plan9 had been taken as the basis of an OS with the backing of a big firm like Apple and serious commitment to developing it. (alas!)
PAPPPmAc 6y ago
(Author chiming in, you've given me an opportunity for one of my favorite sport-arguments) I'll admit that even Jean-Louis Gassée (Former Mac head, Be founder) later said NeXT+Steve was the right choice (see: https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-jobss-next-over-my-beos/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-... ) - though he said it for personal reasons based on his contempt for Apple's management. Some not-carefully-composed points of argument that Be might have been the right choice, because I like doing it for sport: BeOS was truly a ground-up creation, OpenStep was a Display PostScript environment largely licensed from Adobe running on a hacked-up Mach with some BSD pieces pulled inside the kernel boundary to make performance acceptable (this is XNU, the kernel Apple still uses in everything). That had two points for Be - Apple had to replace the whole display layer, partly for licensing cost reasons and partly because developers weren't interested in dealing with the "Yellow Box" OpenStep API or being stuck in the "Blue Box" legacy compatibility jail. Equally or more important, BeOS was vastly more performant on the same hardware - doing the "the UI stays responsive while I'm playing a dozen media files back on this shitty Pentum MMX" stunt was always a blast around the turn of the century. BeOS was also naively SMP with a nifty and mostly pleasant thread model that has some advantages (and annoyances) over the dominant event loop way of things, but always remained responsive, while Apple inherited the spinning beach ball from NeXT. For another big technical point that history actually agrees with me on, OpenStep used a passable UFS implementation (that Apple reverted to HFS+, which was already getting long in the tooth in the late 90s, apparently largely because Adobe wouldn't get their shit together to make their products run on a case-sensitive FS...), but BeFS was lovely in ways we're finally getting elsewhere 20+ years later - exactly so in fact, Apple eventually hired Dominic Giampaolo who designed BeFS to design APFS, and it really shows. BeOS was also already suited for semi-embedded applications, both in various commercial multimedia gadgets, and also the BeIA internet appliance stuff. Since the bulk of modern NextStep-family devices are phones and tablets, there's no reason to think a Gasse/Be Apple wouldn't have thrived in this environment (I know, Palm borrowed Be parts for Palm OS Cobalt and didn't do well, but maybe they were already doomed by that time). Also, Be was _profoundly_ personal, looking toward a "everyone has their own WebServer running their personal services" kind of future, rather than the "Everyone back into the ~~mainframe~~ major cloud provider" future we got, and I can't help but thinking having one of the big industry players not in the roach-motel platform game would have been good for society. Jobs did in fact use a ThinkPad running OpenStep/Rhapsody builds around the time of the NeXT-buys-Apple-with-Apple's-Money situation. It was a 560 (not E), there is a NextComputers forum thread about it where Marc J. Driftmeyer who set up the machine Steve had at Macworld '97 talks about it http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0 http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=457.0 .

smilekzs 6y ago

I had a 600E! It was my very first laptop, and I learned Flash 4 (of Macromedia era) on it. It stood out so much against its contemporaries and made me a ThinkPad fan to this day.

nicklaf 6y ago
In high school I ran Plan 9 on a 600E I found on ebay. The specs were plenty fast enough to run the fourth edition of Plan 9, which hadn't gotten any slower since the early 90s... and Bell Labs had thoroughly worked out the driver kinks on that machine. I was even able to join wifi networks through the PCMCIA card, which was also supported by Plan 9. Pretty fun to be running a fully graphical Unix successor on native hardware with what probably is a fraction of SLOC compared to most stripped down embedded Linux systems you'll find today. When something went south you could just peak at the kernel source code, and even on a Pentium II it would compile the changed objects in less than a minute! And not even knowing C that well at the time, I made several functional changes to the system. I can't imagine being that cavalier on Linux today over a decade later.... To this day I'm not sure I've used a laptop that has as nice a form factor. Especially wonderful was the tactile feel of the keyboard.

byw 6y ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been a spiritual successor of the original ThinkPads from a premium small-scale producer in Shenzhen (that I'm aware of), given the amount of niche mom & pop phone/PC producers over there. (I know there's a company that puts new chips in old chassis, but it'd be great to see new chassis from scratch as well).

phonon 6y ago
Huawei MateBook X Pro?
- SahAssar 6y ago
  Seems to be lacking a lot of what made the old thinkpads great in comparison to modern laptops like repairability, great keyboard, ruggedness, matte screens, great linux support, etc. The matebook x pro seems more like just another modern ultrabook.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    After taking a look myself, I agree with the above -- it looks like a wannabe MacBook. Hell, the name "matebook x" even implies not-quite-Macbook. Which is exactly what the old school Thinkpads are not.
nikanj 6y ago
GPD Pocket et al?
emptyparadise 6y ago
How I'd love to see something like classic ThinkPads again: completely self-serviceable and upgradeable with plenty of parts and lots of support available. So sick of glue and crazy proprietary chips and boards.
- close04 6y ago
  Hardware became a commodity over the past 2-3 decades. It gets replaced, not serviced. And most people got used to not caring about getting something serviced beyond a few consumables (like a battery). It's hard to stay afloat selling to a niche so not many companies try. On the other hand the pace of evolution has slowed down and upgrading stuff is less of a necessity today. So most people no longer feel the need to pay for flexibility, they'll go for other things like design, thinness, weight, etc. Phones probably showed the way, they became the ubiquitous computing device and for anyone born in this era they simply set the standard fro all other devices. I miss my ThinkPad 600x for example but not necessarily because I could (and did) tear it down and build it back over and over again. But also because it seems today we're sacrificing a bit too much for the sake of design. Like impossible to use keyboards, lack of ports, everything glued, etc. because anything else will make the device a bit thicker or heavier.

DonHopkins 6y ago

>It didn’t come with a cap on the TrackPoint, so I swiped a proper “classic dome” from the spares that came with my T60p to make everything period correct (aside: why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are cheap and everywhere). I still don’t care for Trackpoints, but it has cachet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 >Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2] or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written up and published the story. [3] >[...] >Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares! >He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.

touisteur 6y ago
Oh how I'll miss my hands never leaving the keyboard when I have to give up my T430 for another brand... Ted Selker be blessed.
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  Those patents must be due to expire soon if they haven’t already. Maybe system76 can save us?
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    In order for System76 to save us, Clevo would have to save us, first (since the former sells rebranded laptops manufactured by the latter, last I checked). Dell and HP already offer TrackPoint-equivalents on their Latitudes/Precisions and EliteBooks (respectively) and have been doing so for more than a decade now, so it seems the patents are definitely expired. I feel like the IBM/Lenovo version is higher-quality, though.

mng2 6y ago

I operated a 570 for a few years, back around 2006. I don't remember how I decided to get one, but it could run Win2K, my preferred OS at the time, and had a USB port. At the time I was doing most of my work through SSH and X sessions... Firefox ran but it was slow. I remember sending the original battery pack off to get rebuilt -- they probably weren't expecting such an antique!

mysterypie 6y ago

> It was listed as “No HDD” which was visibly a lie because this thing still has its screw cover stickers intact I’m trying to understand why anyone would lie about not having a hard disk. Is there some rule on the auction website that hard disks must have been removed or wiped?

p_l 6y ago
Seller not knowing combined with common approach of removing hard drives to either sell separately or because of data wiping. The CMOS battery error could have confused the final seller. It's quite often that such finds come through multiple hands, and by the time it hits eBay/whatever the seller has no idea what they are selling except maybe for what's written on labels and can be decided in 5 minutes from looking at the wares :) That's how I bought my (former now) AlphaStation 255/233, I noticed the case being sold as "old server case for use as HTPC" :)
- PAPPPmAc 6y ago
  This. Goodwill's policy is, AFIK, a "reasonable measures to wipe" so once they saw it fail to POST and no obvious HDD caddy they just listed.

neilv 6y ago

I didn't imagine seeing a post about the 560E on HN, :) but here's some vintage Linux support and hardware notes: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ If you can't find replacement batteries, and you're willing to do the research to make sure you do it safely, you might be able to put new cells in an old battery. Since (IIRC) you'll probably need PCMCIA for WiFi anyway, rather than getting past mini-PCIe allowlisting, there's less motivation to bring up Coreboot on it. But you could try. https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/ The 560E was a fine machine, and probably close to the last best ThinkPad. A few ThinkPad models later, when I moved to the T60, I didn't like the T60 as much, including the keyboard and fit&finish. Still, today I transplant original T60 keyboards into somewhat newer ThinkPads (since, in the generation after the T60, the keyboard backing started flexing too much, and also, the key action otherwise doesn't seem as reliable). Another reason to find original T60 keyboards is that a lot of the new replacement keyboard parts now are very low-quality counterfeits, e.g., bad key action, and requiring multiple presses of a TrackPoint button to get one to register, on a new unit. (So bad, that cleaning 20 years of strangers' crumbs and dandruff out of an original keyboard starts to seem like even more of an attractive idea.)

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"Initially the battery was reporting itself dead, as you would expect for a 23 year old battery. On a whim I tried the “briefly near-short the battery with a continuity tester in both directions and see if it will take a charge” thing while I was probing to see if it showed any potential (it did, around 6v) – I got lucky, not only did it not catch fire, the original battery now charges to “full” and holds a nontrivial charge, it claims an hour or two in the battery meter which isn’t far from original claimed endurance." Interesting! A technique for reviving (well, enough to boot and run!) apparently dead laptop batteries... I did not know this was possible!

PAPPPmAc 6y ago
It is neither reliable nor guaranteed safe. I have an MSEE and can't explain to my own satisfaction why it sometimes works. The only thing I've read that makes sense is that it resets the protection circuitry after an undervoltage or other lock-out event.

ubermonkey 6y ago

Wow. I had a 560Z, which was the same form factor but with different options. I'm completely unsurprised that some still exist in great shape, because those machines were insanely overengineered. Mine showed no real wear after 2.5 years of daily use including no small amount of travel, and by that point it had stopped being appealing as a work platform. It was actually my last daily-driver Windows machine. I was working mostly in Office apps at the time, and Win95/98 was just GARBAGE on a laptop. You couldn't reliably sleep. It crashed all the time. Eventually, it drove me to buy a Mac, based on the experiences of one of my business partners. This was pre-OSX, so the OS was only about 30% more stable than Win95, but sleep worked EVERY TIME, and the whole system was more responsive. Then the dot-com crash happened, and OS X happened, and I went back to coding as a solo act. But I sure have fond memories of that 560Z.

awiesenhofer 6y ago

Wow, I never thought of seeing the 560E on the frontpage of HN. I still have mine to play old win9x and DOS games. Runs Windows 98SE perfectly, on its original HDD and is still just a joy to use. Had to transfer most of my old games to it via IrDA, long before i finally bought a USB PCMCIA-Card. Never had the external floppy drive though...