Lenovo ThinkPad 701C

> OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great. Thinkpads were great too. I had the Thinkpad 701C with the butterfly keyboard. It was awesome for its time.

Oh wow, the T25, I'm jealous :) I used to own the 701C that JGC restored and was super happy to see what he did with it! Now that I've owned that legend my wish-list still contains: T25, W700ds, Thinkpad 15th anniversary edition and the TransNote.

I did telephone tech support for Thinkpads in the mid 90s. It was a bit of a rare treat to actually take a call for the 701c because they were generally pretty solid. “Hello and thank you for calling the IBM PC call center. My name is ___, may I get your name and telephone number please?” … 10 hours a day, 4 days per week.

I've used and still own several early ThinkPads. The keyboards from this ThinkPad era are unmatched in overall tactile quality.

I apologise for being ambiguous. « My dad had a laptop in the mid-90s that had a floppy drive, and I think a parallel port, too. » When I said "none of them did" I meant that no IBM Butterfly had these things, not that no 1990s laptop did. The 701C is a subnotebook and IBM left out everything it could. I do have a floppy drive, and it worked fine. For the rest, when I needed it, I used PCMCIA devices. « The Butterfly was meant to be used with a docking station, but I never managed to get my hands on one. I just enjoy looking at it and thinking what a great laptop it was in its day. I'd like very much to have one with a fold-out keyboard today. » Oh really? I've never seen a docking station for one. For the rest, yes, I totally agree. :-) An interesting take is the Sony Vaio P, which attacked the problem from another angle. It is basically the shape of the keyboard. So it's very shallow front-to-back but had an almost letter-box shaped screen. I have one. Sadly it's very underpowered, and has a terrible keyboard, poor pointing device, and the VGA-cum-Ethernet dongle I bought separately doesn't work. The form-factor has immense potential, but this is not a good version of it.

The first time I saw that laptop was in the bar at a Hyatt. I am sure the lady thought I was a doofus but she was gracious enough to show it to me and let me open and close it a few times. That machine evoked the same feeling of quality that I only got from a few other devices; I put it in the same class as a hp15c, psp or iphone.

FWIW, there's a move to transplant Framework brains into older Thinkpads [0]. The Framekenpad . I would love a Framework with a Thinkpad keyboard! [0]: https://community.frame.work/t/thinkpad-701c-with-a-framewor...

I 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.