A look at IBM's short-lived "butterfly" ThinkPad 701 of 1995

I had one! I bought a used IBM ThinkPad 701 in a Hong Kong computer market in 1996 while backpacking through China and Southeast Asia. I think it was $800 or $900.

Although primitive by today's standards, it was a solid little laptop that served me well for the tasks I was engaged in at the time … writing, Web surfing (on a very slow modem), learning HTML, and playing Doom.

It had a color screen, a big improvement over the greyscale screen I had on my previous laptop (no name Taiwanese brand that cost $2000 new!)

The 701 also easily fit in a book bag, although it was a bit thick and heavy.

There are some more photos and historical information about the 701 here:

http://renaissancechambara.jp/2012/04/26/ibm-thinkpad-701/

It hurts to look at this page. So many ads, video playing in the background. What the hell?

>Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Ah, well. I tried it under a Gemini proxy too, same message.

I might run it under edbrowse with Duktape. And it worked, but without Javascript enabled to my surprise:

https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse

Have fun learning a browser for the blind, but unvaluable for the hacker (either sighted or not).

Fast guide (you ed users already know how to use edbrowse, just glance a bit at the docs/ and you are done):

      0z24 #we go to the top of the page
       # and set scrollling height
      z # page down
      z # pagedown 
      /foo #term to search
      g1 # if we are seeing {a link} {another one}, go to the first one. 
      rf #refresh the page 

editing and submitting forms takes a while to learn, but you can read the docs and that's it. If you are a blind user at HN (and there is at least one I know), you can use yasr with speech-dispatcher to read your terminal.

Guide for OpenBSD users:

https://blog.thechases.com/posts/bsd/setting-up-a-terminal-s...

Edbrowse doubles as an editor, mail client and irc one too. And gopher of course. So, yasr will do a brilliant job there.

I owned one of these back in the day and loved it. Not long ago I did a total restoration of one: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...

"Thin and large" is specifically American obsession. Those weren't just major technical challenges, Japanese users cared less about those two aspects. People wanted an inflatable do-everything brick. The butterfly keyboard served that demand.