Last week I was reunited with my first laptop in my coming of age years.
Technically it was not the first. In the late 80’s was tinkering with a white Toshiba laptop with touting the first liquid crystal display at that time, a huge upgrade from my 4-color CGA 386 desktop. I digress.
The IBM ThinkPad 700c was released in 1992. My dad brought home one from work in 1993. I was a thirteen year old experiencing Dune II and Quest for Glory IV in full 256 colors (the ‘c’ in 700c stood for Color). I remember every switch and slider. The left and right physical locks, the brightness and contrast sliders, the 3.5 in floppy disk and the removable battery that I would pretend to be a starship docking into base. This was the first device I ever upgraded, from 4MB RAM to 8MB. Dad helped me buy that RAM from a small shop in Hong Kong.
It was the laptop I used to lock myself in the bathroom, playing Star Control II in full color. This was the laptop I used for Civilization II, a game every 90’s kid loved and used to pass History exams with their wild imaginations of Hammurabi and Gandhi initiating nuclear war.
And that’s that. A hit of nostalgia. Me remembering my late father who really made my next few years with the most advanced laptop in the planet (at least until the Butterfly edition came out a few years later). My dad was his own level of nerdiness and I am so glad that stuck with me. I do what I do now because of how he exposed me to technology at such an early age.
Lenovo owns the PC division of IBM now and I’m glad they preserved this bit of history at their Yamato Lab in Yokohama.
