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ThinkPad 701C with a Framework brain transplant
- hinata08 4y agoI had a think pad from the early 90s (running on win. 3.1), that I bought in the middle if the 2010s to also do that. It had a floppy disk drive and analog port Anyway, i couldn't even have time to work on it, as materials from the 90s didn't age well. Just by opening the screen to boot it up a few times, the plastic case broke. After opening the service panels, the foams inside (because there needed foam on the hdd for some reason) went into mist so the MB and the electronic part was the only that was recoverable, not the plastic shell I wonder if OP is having the same issue, if he tries to actually use the laptop
- serf 4y agoI think it depends on the environment the laptop saw the most. ThinkPads from outside/UV-heavy jobs tend to be very brittle, i've experienced similar things.
- albastru 4y agoWhat analog port was that?
- camtarn 4y agoThe game-port perhaps? It had analog inputs for potentiometer-based joysticks/paddles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
- brk 4y agoI don't remember game ports on any of the Thinkpads (I worked for IBM at the time and serviced a lot of the very early 700's and 710's). They had parallel ports, DB9 serial, DB15 VGA, and a couple of PCMCIA/PCCARD slots, IIRC. Game ports were DB15, and as the Thinkpads were squarely targeted at business users, taking up the real estate for a "game" port would seem unlikely, and possibly even a turn off for buyers of that era. At some point internal modem's and NICs came along, but I think we might have been out of the 90's by the time that happened. I remember juggling an analog modem, 10Mbps Ethernet and 4/16Mbps Token ring PCMCIA card, depending on what I was doing at the moment.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> a ~10" compact laptop that IBM sold for a brief period in the mid-90s. It has a full sized keyboard that flares out as you open the lid It always amazes me what guys in 1995 could fit a full sized keyboard with all keys in ~10", yet since 2010 the humanity lost this wondrous know-how and now even in a 15" notebook you would only get an abomination with merged keys and goddamn PrtScr instead of ContextMenu.
- atdrummond 4y agoI think we can blame the mass emulation of Apple products by others for this phenomenon. Since Jobs/Ive would never make such a design, neither will the other major laptop firms.
- rchaud 4y agoMacbooks go way too far with this now. I'm typing this on a 2014 base model MBP that has both 1x HDMI, 2x miniDP and 2x USB 3 ports. On the 2020 M1 MBP, you get 2 USB ports, and that's it! And they have to handle power, display AND headphones!
- rappr 4y agoApple hasn't removed the headphone jack from any of their laptops.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoOh Gawd don't get me started. I spent personal money on the ThinkPad t25 years ago so I could have aproper keyboard with proper home/end/pgup/pgdwn block. It's still my main daily driver. Now every laptop invents it's own abomination and layout, with key keys scattered and hidden, arrow keys combined, etc (and a track pad that's slowly eating up the entire surface area instead.... Can you tell I'm a track point person :-)
- bartislartfast 4y agoI couldn't afford to buy myself the t25, always wondered if it was worth the money. sounds like it was!
- boomskats 4y agoI absolutely love my 51nb 10th-gen Intel transplant Thinkpad x200. It's incredible how, after 10 years, it still feels better as a piece of hardware than my modern Thinkpads do (not to say that they're at all badly built). Nothing comes close to that keyboard, not even my choc sunsets. I lost my original Thinkpad 700c that I grew up with in a house move about 5 years ago. I don't think I'll ever forgive myself.
- _joel 4y agoYea, I've got a 220 still going strong after a turbulent start, used to randomly reboot but they fixed the BIOS and it's been gtg since. New battery and new keyboard... all good.
- juujian 4y agoInteresting idea. How did you deal with the ports? HDMI and the likes?
- boomskats 4y agoXue Yao has a really nice page [0] explaining how all that stuff works. I got mine from Jacky@lcdfans, and he's been really great to deal with (contrary to his reputation). I haven't used it with an external screen yet, but I believe the type C port supports DP. [0]: https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/ https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/
- mhb 4y agoAfter some of my Carbon X1 keyboard keys stopped working (and trackpoint never seemed to work well (e.g., drift)), I resurrected my X220. The keyboard and working trackpoint are such a joy that it's worth the downgrade of display and sound. Also nice to have a real Ethernet port, memory card slot and Displayport built in.
- eBombzor 4y ago> not to say that they're at all badly built It's okay to be honest. Are modern TPs better built than Walmart laptops? Of course. But do they live up to the price tag and legendary Thinkpad name? No. Not at all. While modern TPs have dipped significantly in quality other manufacturers have been catching up. Some of my issues with T14 Gen 1 1. Cheap daughter boards for USB c ports that hilariously die every few months, on a laptop that only offers USB c charging... 2. Keyboard is trash. I'd rather use the keyboard on my Acer Nitro. High actuation tires out my fingers. 3. Terrible trackpad. Absolutely terrible. Not just the texture but the firmware, it works fine for one second then all of a sudden, it's this laggy, unresponsive mess. 4. Cooling is terrible and laptop throttles constantly. 5. Build quality is terrible for a TP. Screen started peeling off when I dropped it once, the chassis screws are easily stripped, extremely thing plastic gets chipped, random components die and aren't easily replaceable like past TPs. 6. It's just buggy. Function key lights are incorrect randomly, when I plug in my mouse, the trackpad gets like 1-2 second input delay. On the flip side I've been using business Latitudes and Elite books at work which aren't great but still work better than this TP.
- sfeng 4y agoWatch here for a video of how the butterfly keyboard opens: https://youtu.be/nRVJCtREW38?t=567 https://youtu.be/nRVJCtREW38?t=567
- thwliurieu42343 4y ago[flagged]
- maximus-decimus 4y agoI mean... Lenovo is releasing the ThinkBook Twist this year with a lid that has a a lid on each side : an oled on on side and an e-ink on the other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toRHQhR4UPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toRHQhR4UPI And a few years back they had a laptop where the keyboard was an e-ink screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKza2lwgDEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKza2lwgDEg
- WillAdams 4y agoThe new model which I am looking forward to is the Lenovo Yogabook 9i which is two displays facing each other where one can have a keyboard on it, or one can connect an external keyboard and have a dual-screen setup: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/lenovo-dual-screen-laptop-windows-11/32256 https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/lenovo-dual-screen-laptop-w... I'm hoping this form-factor becomes popular enough that someone (Samsung?) makes a version which supports a Wacom EMR stylus (not wild about Wacom AES, though I may have to break down and accept it).
- rejectfinite 4y agoToday is a hell hole of shitty materials too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXBacEH0qo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXBacEH0qo
- Reason077 4y agoJust imagine the engineers who dreamed up the 701C. I wonder what they're doing now days...
- bartislartfast 4y agoJohn Karidis, the designer / inventor, sadly passed away in 2012 at just 53. He had 83 patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Karidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Karidis
- xbar 4y agoRIP John Karidis. Thank you for so much inspired design.
- WillAdams 4y agoWhile not specifically on the 701c, the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue_ covers a lot of the early ThinkPad history and is great reading.
- ofalkaed 4y agoI wanted a 701C so badly back in the day but they were out of reach of my 14 year old self. I have been debating what to do with my old T42 which I recently discovered has died, thinking I will remove the track pad and shorten the case to be just the keyboard which should make it fit a modern screen quite nicely. Will be a bit of a trick to cut the case down and keep it looking good but I am pretty sure I can manage it and this will take care of getting rid of the battery bay. Thinking of just sticking a beagle bone or two in it but I could put a dozen pi zeros in there without even trying but that would limit battery space.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoIf it works out please blog about it. If it doesn’t, failure is hard to admit, but learning from other’s mistakes is still valuable, so please blog about it anyway.
- ofalkaed 4y agoI have absolutely no issues with sharing my failures. Only part of the project which would be iffy is the keyboard/trackpoint, kind of hoping I can just use the GPIO on what ever board I end up with and somehow make it work but I have yet to look into it at all, seems doable for at least the keyboard. The QMK route is always possibly but it feels like the lego theory of electronics and I have a completely pointless aversion to that.
- hunta2097 4y agoI was in an SME in the 90s where we bought 701Cs for the execs. I can confirm they were awesome, back then it was de rigueur to have a chunky docking station to mount your hugely expensive (and altogether hugely) CRT monitor. The 701C had a particularly nice docking station too.
- bartislartfast 4y agoI love the idea of modernising old laptops with this approach. I have a ton of (working) old thinkpads and dells I can't bear to part with, would love to upgrade some this way. I probably would have done the 51nb mod already if I could have just ordered the parts through a regular online store and not the cryptic forum puzzle that was required
- brk 4y agoIt's a cool project, but it appears that it is more of a Thinkpad 701 keyboard ported to entirely new everything else. Hard to call it a laptop modernization, even though it is a very respectable talent to be able to pull that off.
- bartislartfast 4y agoyeah this one is, but I think that's on account of the tiny footprint of the 701. A larger machine would be easier to modernise with framework bits
- kohlerm 4y agoNice, the keyboard runs on QMK :-)
- martin_a 4y agoGreat work to create this FrankenPad! Besides that, Framework overall looks very promising to me. I think they have a nice middle ground between DIY and "works out of the box". Yes, you can change parts if you want, but you don't need to fiddle for hours to get something going again. With enough money you have on-site repairs by big manufacturers, but if your IT guy can just swap the motherboard in 15 minutes with a spare one, that's even better I'd say. I'd love to have a matte screen on their devices, though. That's something I really like on my ThinkPad. Besides that those devices look really good to me and my next device will probably be a Framework laptop. Does anybody have negative experiences with those machines?
- chadash 4y ago> I think they have a nice middle ground between DIY and "works out of the box". Yes, you can change parts if you want, but you don't need to fiddle for hours to get something going again. With enough money you have on-site repairs by big manufacturers, but if your IT guy can just swap the motherboard in 15 minutes with a spare one, that's even better I'd say. Framework owner here. It really is super freaking easy to open up this computer and fix things or swap them around. Easy enough for your average software engineer (who doesn't have much hardware experience), but probably easy enough for your average not-super-technically adept person. On the whole, very happy with my machine. The touchpad wasn't registering all clicks when I first got it, but customer service happily sent me a new one and no issues since then. I also had a driver issue or two when I first got it, but that was resolved when I updated my drivers. I'd happily recommend the computer to any engineer or anyone with decent "techie" skills. It's probably not ready for your less-than-tech-savvy average consumer just yet, but it's close. Also, bonus points for the machine really looking and feeling very premium. I especially love the cover having the nice cog-wheel logo, but no brand name on it. I've had a few people tell me, "wow, that looks nice, what kind of computer is that?".
- martin_a 4y agoGreat to hear that! Can you tell me something about external displays? What's the most I can get out of it? Right now I got one 4K display and one 1080p display but I'm looking into upgrading to two 4K displays. Is that supported by the graphics card?
- a3w 4y ago"Framework" is a modular laptop from the homonymous company, I guess? Was never made clear in the article or title.
- Hamcha 4y agoYes, the article doesn't mention it since it's posted on the Framework forums
- unwind 4y agoCorrect, and since the article is on their very site [1] I guess the context can be forgiven for being assumed. [1]: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
- bartislartfast 4y agoI think its become well known enough at this point?
- petodo 4y agoWhat is the point of these high resolution displays in 10" body? Actually I don't understand them even in bigger bodies, you still can't see anything without resizing whole display and they eat a lot of battery.
- Synaesthesia 4y agoIts great to have a sharp IPS screen and frankly shouldnt be an issue for modern hardware to power. Macs and iPads have had it for a long time and most modern laptops now too.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoThe main problem is what 1366x768 was unusable a decade ago, even more uncomfortable now. And nowadays even 10" screens in tablets are bigger anyway. You can always scale up.
- jasoneckert 4y agoI find this incredibly fitting. The ThinkPad 701 is a textbook example of amazing design/engineering principles (which is why there is one on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art), and the Framework laptop aspires to be another one.
- causi 4y agoShame he couldn't keep the PC Card slots. Would be sweet to have a modern laptop that's compatible with the folding card slot mouse: https://media.techeblog.com/images/cardmouse.jpg https://media.techeblog.com/images/cardmouse.jpg
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoSTM32 can interface with 16-bit cards so a USB bridge is doable with some driver work.
- causi 4y agoIt's a bluetooth mouse that only uses the card slot to charge the battery. It's a shame no modern laptop comes with storage for a travel mouse.
- imiric 4y agoPCMCIA was such a cool expansion slot, but not because of that mouse monstrosity. :) From NICs and modems, to memory cards and hard drives—it was incredibly versatile. Hot swappable too, assuming your OS supported this well. It was the USB before USB, and for a short time there were PC cards with USB ports for machines that didn't have any. Even today, I miss having an internal slot of that size, instead of a dozen different USB devices and dongles. But my favorite has got to be the Rex 3 PDA[1][2]. I've never used it, but back then it must've felt magical. [1]: https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/rex-wasnt-really-a-pda-it-was-the-first-great-digital-rolodex/ https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/rex-wasnt-really-a-pda-it-wa... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQNAg3TxCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQNAg3TxCo
- askvictor 4y agoI had an HP branded mouse like this; also had a 'presentation mode' where it functioned as a slide clicker + laser pointer. Good times.
- culopatin 4y agoThis makes me want a MacBook display wired as an external monitor. My work laptop is an HP 1040 g8 with the privacy screen. It’s the worst screen I’ve ever used. I think an old TN panel from the early 2000s had more brightness and better viewing angles. I don’t understand how HP tested this and said “yep it’s good for a $2K laptop”. Anytime I’m by a window I can’t see what’s on the screen. Working outside is only possible if you like squinting and you’re looking at a white background with black text. Not to mention the abysmal viewing angles keep you shifting on your chair as you read. Anyway, having a regular 13in MacBook Air or pro Retina display to hdmi would be awesome. I don’t think I’d be the only one to use it. I wouldn’t even need a stand, I’d put it right on top of this screen and be done.
- mschuster91 4y ago> My work laptop is an HP 1040 g8 with the privacy screen. It’s the worst screen I’ve ever used. I think an old TN panel from the early 2000s had more brightness and better viewing angles. I don’t understand how HP tested this and said “yep it’s good for a $2K laptop”. Well, that's the price you gotta pay for a laptop with privacy protectors - these things are used for restricting viewing angles so that, say, passersby on a train can't read your highly confidential PowerPoint slides full of corporate double-speak and general bullshit... and usually bought and required by organizations who think their corporate double-speak PowerPoints are so uber secret that it is worth making the lifes of their employees measurably worse in exchange.
- culopatin 4y agoNot to this extent. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with these screens, but the filter can be turned on and off. The previous one I had was the 840 g5 and that one had a much much MUCH nicer screen that still had the privacy filter. That one looked almost normal with the filter off. This one, 3 generations later, looks like the proof of concept model.
- djaychela 4y agoWhen I see this I do think there would be a market for a drop-in motherboard replacement for macbooks. Not necessarily to upgrade them to run macOS, but to take a (say) 2015 macbook which has an excellent keyboard, mouse and screen, and have an upgraded motherboard that is a drop-in replacement. It would mean a lot less equipment going in landfills, and from my experience of earlier (pre-2014) models, they tend to follow the same form factor for a few years, so there would be a reasonable market for it? I'm writing this on a 2011 MBP which is running Monterey because of OpenCore Patcher, and it's a bit slow, but everything about it physically is better than most laptops I would get for under £500. This with a faster processor, graphics and RAM would do me for another 5 years for 'general' duties.
- radomir_cernoch 4y agoThere is a market for upgraded ThinkPads: https://www.facebook.com/lcdfans/ https://www.facebook.com/lcdfans/ http://www.cnmod.cn/ http://www.cnmod.cn/ The "e-shop" makes it quite hard to order, but... it exists. :-)
- TwoFerMaggie 4y ago> Because the COVID-19 in China, we can not work ,and we was blocked in home ,we can not go anywhere . > Please wait some days ,I think the COVID-19 will go away in 3-2020 . :( this makes me really sad... hope they're still doing okay now
- Squarex 4y agoit looks so, in december they posted: > We are free now . So, we will ship some laptop now .
- mcbuilder 4y agoSometimes I wonder why I keep a boxes full of a good dozen late IBM era Thinkpads, and I remember thinks like this exist and hopefully will continue into the future with modern tech like OLED, power efficient chips. Maybe if I even just use the chassis, I just love the feel of the T42 - T63, 4:3 aspect ratio is perfect, arguably the best laptop keyboard of all time, trackpoint, tracklight, dat Mg case, beautiful 90s business aesthetics.
- nerdyadventurer 4y agoNot related, I am asking this because Lenovo is mentioned on HN very often. Can anyone please explain what is special about Lenovo laptops? As I know it is China based company.
- explorigin 4y agoLenovo, the company, bought the Thinkpad line from IBM. At the time the Thinkpad line had a near-religious following for quality and durability. Lenovo had done a decent job maintaining the Thinkpad reputation for enough of its models.
- explorigin 4y agoThey also had unique innovations that few other laptops had: a finger joystick for a mouse, an overhead keyboard light (before we had glowing keys), expanding keyboards for small models, etc.
- deutschepost 4y agoI think most people are very fond of the ThinkPad Series which was bought by Lenovo from IBM in 2005. These laptops are very well built and have good Linux support. And in the past had outstanding repairability.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoGood quality, good materials, matte screens, great keyboards, usually very linux compatible, durable, user raplacable parts (atleast in older models)... basically a very capable (although expensive) business laptop. You also have the dell xps series and the old HP probooks, but that's about it. (of course I'm talking about the business class laptops, so thnkpads, mostly T and somewhat X series, since lenovo also produces cheap crap). Also, they used to be made by IBM "back in the day", until the chinese bought the brand and designs.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago"matte" screens, not good screens! There are lots of x220 and similar with terrible, low viewing angle, 1366x768, low contrast displays. Transplants from XPS series displays are popular for obvious reasons. I think a big part of the appeal is that the business workstations were popular for businesses, and those businesses would operate on a 2-, 3-, or 5-year upgrade cycle and unload used high-quality workstations on eBay for dirt cheap, which also made them popular with the hacker crowd.
- syntaxing 4y agoReminds me of the “X62” mod I did a couple years ago. It was quite expensive all said and done but was so satisfying upgrading the X61 to a sharp screen and new motherboard
- ct0 4y agoI picked up an x62 complete system and its been fantastic. I dont use it as much as I should, but I love the feeling I get booting it up. Its very unique in the collection of thinkpads I have amassed over the years.
- jon-wood 4y agoThe touch that I liked most on this was the internal USB-A port for a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse dongle, because who wants a little lump of plastic sticking out of the side of their laptop all the time?
- dchuk 4y agoConverting that old iPad screen into a normal DisplayPort screen is really cool, could be handy on something like raspberry pi’s or nucs. In the thread linked to about that part, it’s not clear to me if that is an aftermarket part you can buy or something he designed, any ideas?
- surteen 4y agoIt's something they designed, but there are existing "iPad LCD to HDMI" controller boards that would be easier to interface with than eDP. https://www.ebay.com/itm/265471676732 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265471676732 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1652 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1652
- post_break 4y agoI wish there was a modern X230 drop in. Something with great battery life, 1080p drop in screen support, etc.
- Decabytes 4y agoI love the idea of breathing new life into old hardware like this. I bought an X220 for $297 in 2015 because I needed a laptop for college and it was all I could afford. It’s built like a tank and has survive a lot that I put it through. I went through grad school with it and retired it after I graduated. The biggest thing that held me back was the screen resolution, but everything else was awesome (especially the keyboard). An x220 with framework guts and a better screen would be sweet!
- ianbooker 4y agoAnother and maybe more accessible target would be the IBM Thinkpad X41. It was incredibly slim for its time, it still kept the 4:3 screen ratio (not sure if compatible with the bigger ipads?). I wrote a bachelor thesis on it and a fanless version would still be the laptop of my dreams.
- some_random 4y agoThat is so goddamn cool, I love that Framework is making this kinda thing reasonably accessible!
- cstross 4y agoThe 701C's butterfly keyboard is surely out of patent protection by now, right? I'd love to see that style of folding keyboard revived -- either as a standalone bluetooth keyboard for tablets/phones, or as part of on the the 7" to 10" mini-ultrabooks Chinese vendors like GPD and One Netbook sell. Or maybe a Framework mini-ultrabook with a 9" or 10" screen ...?
- jtwaleson 4y agoIt’s from 1995 so yes. But it’s bulky, pretty fragile and difficult to integrate properly with a modern lightweight notebook chassis. I would personally love this, just like I would love a phone with a physical keyboard like the old T-Mobile G1 but there is no mass market for it.
- isr 4y agoUmm, Planet Computer's Gemini anyone? Easily the most heavily used & abused phone I've ever had. Still waiting for my (long overdue) Astro Slide to ship ...
- cstross 4y agoThe Astro Slide is shipping (mine arrived in mid-January!) but it's a little small for touch-typing -- what I'm after is a 65% or larger full-scale keyboard that packs down into something a bit larger than the Gemini/Cosmo/Astro, or their design predecessor the Psion Series 5.
- aidenn0 4y ago16:9 and 16:10 screens, plus the existence of a touchpad make it less of a thing.
- kemiller 4y agoThere’s little point in the era of cheap giant lcds… but man I loved that little machine. Kept mine for many years until enough plastic parts had degraded and it literally fell apart.
- ravagat 4y agoIncredible work, I love the ThinkPad 701C and wish for a resurgence of that type of industrial design. Very exciting to see that a transplant is possible albeit not simple
- mk_stjames 4y agoWhat is most surprising about this to me is that the iPad screen uses just standard displayport lanes as the interface and doesn't need anything crazy to drive it other than a backlight voltage boost converter. That is useful to know.