Randomly searching through my closet today, I have retrieved an item from the early IBM’s laptop era: the IBM ThinkPad 760XL. This laptop launched in April 1997 was part of the 760 series of high end ThinkPad’s famous for their sophistication and high performance.
The ThinkPad 760XL has an Intel Pentium MMX processor clocked at 166 MHz and 16 MB of EDO RAM (expandable to 104 MB). This particular laptop comes with a 5GB hard drive and a 12.1-inch SVGA+ TFT display (800×600 pixel resolution). The graphic card is the Trident Cyber9385 GPU with 1 MB of video RAM.
It has the ESS 1688 AudioDrive, a reasonable level of sound for the time. The 760 series is well noted for the modular design which can be easily reached under the keyboard – which can be lifted up, like a car’s hood, to reveal the battery, the hard drive, and the Ultrabay – a modular bay that could hold a CD-drive, floppy disk drive, another hard drive or additional battery.
One surprise is the PCMCIA V .34 data/fax modem that came with the laptop, I could just source a cable for it and ‘fly’ on the Internet like I was doing three decades ago, via a dialup connection.
The modular design improved the laptop’s capability for expansion and also made the laptop more versatile. I was taking several detailed photos of this old laptop, including the internal parts. But I couldn’t boot it up because it didn’t have the right IBM 4-pin power supply. This is because this specific charger is very proprietary to IBM, thus rendering most chargers or adaptations incompatible.
I however have plans to source such a charger, and then I will make another post showcasing the 760XL (hopefully) powering it on, and I will see if there’s any OS installed on it. The HDD actually might be one of the early SSD’s, but I didn’t opened it’s case to check its labels, yet.
To be continued.
