When was thinkpad laptop first released

Over the next eight years, IBM used the ThinkPad name to bring several innovations to the business-laptop market. Some of these stuck while others were so gimmicky that they quickly faded into memory. While somewhat convenient, the BJ was rather unreliable and quite a bit bulkier than other laptops on the market.

The BJ saw a limited release run in Japanese markets but never saw a successor. Marketed as a subnotebook, the ThinkPad was a small laptop that made some compromises in its quest for compactness. The featured a 7. The P featured a 9. This design was refined with the ThinkPad P, which offered an improved 9.

While both models are incredibly thick by today's standards, they nonetheless were quite revolutionary for their time. While offering only iterative improvements in other features over older models, the CD's optical drive would remain a staple of mainline flagship ThinkPad devices until the ThinkPad T removed the drive in Lastly, we will mention the ThinkPad C.

The "Butterfly ThinkPad," as it has come to be known, is held in high regard for its beautifully designed keyboard mechanism. The internal keyboard is separated into two halves. When the laptop's lid is opened, these halves swivel together to create an oversized keyboard that overhangs the sides of the case.

The C has achieved such renown that a unit was included in an industrial design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. There were far too many ThinkPad models released between and to discuss here , by our count , but suffice it to say that IBM hit a home run with the C and continued to score year after year. ThinkPads quickly grew to become the de facto business laptops. However, IBM would soon find itself striking out. At the turn of the century, IBM was on top of the business-laptop world.

While the 90s saw the introduction and evolution of the ThinkPad line, the early s were marked by device stagnation. IBM codified the ThinkPad model name scheme that we know today, but a lack of innovation and some questionable design choices left the company in a difficult situation. The early aughts did see a few successes. Marketed as a minimal-compromise "thin-and-light" business laptop, the T20 crammed Pentium III power into a reasonably compact case.

IBM shrunk the ThinkPad package even further with the X20 later that year, albeit while sacrificing a bit on the CPU clock speed and other specifications. Each of these would spawn their own successors. The T-series continued to be a general-purpose "jack of all trades" business line. The X-series was marketed to road warriors in need of an easily luggable machine, and the A-series was billed as a desktop replacement.

The next year saw the introduction of the R-series with the ThinkPad R30, a budget-friendly ThinkPad that could be thought of as an ancestor of the current L-series. There were also a few outliers, like the ThinkPad S30 that was sold only in Asian markets. Each year saw iterative improvements in each line with nothing standing out. ThinkPads were starting to stagnate, so IBM attempted to market new ideas that ultimately fell short.

Perhaps the most notorious of these is the ThinkPad TransNote, a notebook computer embedded into a literal notebook. Comprised of a padfolio with a full computer in one side and a paper notepad on the other, the TransNote was too much of a niche product and ultimately failed.

IBM sadly couldn't keep the train on the tracks. The deal was finalized in May of , and Lenovo took to the ground running. The transition to Lenovo was almost unnoticeable: The T60 retained many of the tried-and-true ThinkPad design choices.

However, the T60 introduced something that was revolutionizing the computer world - multi-core processors. The T60 also marked the first use of the magnesium-alloy roll cage that came to define ThinkPad build quality, a 3G modem, and more. The T60 is still held in high regard by computer enthusiasts and is seen by many as the last true ThinkPad, mainly due to its design language, build quality, and aspect ratio display. There is still a large community dedicated to the T60, and the machine has been well-supported by enthusiasts in the Linux community.

Under Lenovo's direction, the ThinkPad line would once again rise and dominate the business market. The T60 did extremely well in the market and helped the ThinkPad line recover from the wounds it suffered over the previous half-decade. The next year saw a shift in direction for the ThinkPad line. Unlike the T61, the T was only available with a widescreen display. While most laptops on the market at this point were shifting to widescreen displays, many ThinkPad fans hoped their beloved business laptop would hold on to the older aspect ratio.

Thus, the T created some controversy among the ThinkPad crowd; some saw the shift in design as a step forward, while others decried Lenovo's decision as anathema. Either way, widescreen was here to stay. Widescreen-only display options came to the X-series as well with the ThinkPad X The keyboard would automatically expand as you opened the screen lid.

The two halves of the keyboard were split diagonally and met at a stairstep seam. Ultrabooks might be ubiquitous today, but the ThinkPad was arguably the first ultraportable laptop. The Despite its slim proportions, few — if any — compromises were made, with a keyboard that still felt like a typewriter. Designed for extreme portability, the This was a monumental year for ThinkPad, as was the year in which Lenovo acquired the company.

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The desktop and portable computers in its pages are beige and bulbous, bearing scant resemblance to their modern descendants. A ad for one of the first ThinkPads. In , critics and customers immediately identified the ThinkPad C as an important product. The company also issued a press release trumpeting , orders for ThinkPads including the C and two lower-end models with monochrome screens in eight weeks.

What nobody knew at the time was that the ThinkPad name, design aesthetic, and emphasis on technological innovation in the service of reliable productivity would have such staying power. Back in , 11 years after it released its original personal computer , IBM was still one of the biggest names in the industry. IBM, by contrast, was still a vertically integrated manufacturer, a fact that the new machine showed off in multiple ways.

Thanks to a joint venture between IBM and Toshiba, it was also one of the earliest notebook computers with an active-matrix thin-film transistor TFT display, the first technology to provide really good color in portable form. Only later, would that come to be considered on the dinky side. That location was intended to let you swap in a disk on an airplane without elbowing your seatmate.

It was a significant improvement on the unwieldy, poorly placed trackballs that were typical fare on other laptops of the day.