Thinkpad 701 overclocking and AMD-X5 133 MHz mod (2014)

> On the other hand, the battery is long gone

There are businesses who will take your old battery, crack it open and put in fresh cells. Or you can do it yourself.

> there is no floppy, no CD ROM, no builtin ethernet, so I cannot get any data on or off that device or install a different operating system.

You have a 16 bit PCMCIA slot, and you can still find cards for that if you look hard enough. (I picked up an original Orinoco wifi card for under $10.) Remember, the gold stripe on the card means 32 bit. Avoid those.

And the standard way for working with these old computers is to get an external HDD case and swap out the drive. Or anything that you can use as a USB-IDE adapter. Then you can install whatever you want. Though you really shouldn't use spinning rust that old. I typically use a 16GB CF card in a CF-IDE adapter. (I do this in my 600E, for example.) It works very well since the protocols are the same.

Edit: So maybe CF cards don't work in the 701, see http://www.os2museum.com/wp/butterfly-conservation/

Because it is expensive and contains quite a lot of moving parts, requiring precision engineering and possibly manual assembly. I doubt these were scalable to mass production. (Additionally, it contributed to the thickness of assembly — tho those who don't remember, Thinkpad 701 was _incredibly_ thick).

I owned a 701c, the keyboard was clearly better than anything available today.

Another example is "Big Berta" (IBM T220/T221), a 21" screen with full 4K resolution available back in 2001! It offered PPI resolution better than modern Retina displays.

It was insanely expensive, though.

Back when IBM had an outlet store in RTP (at the Morrisville outlet mall), I asked one of the employees there about the keyboard and why it wasn't carried forward to new models. He said they had a lot of returns on them, as the cam that controlled the sliding-puzzle-action when the lid was opened wore more quickly than expected.

It really was a unique design and got the Thinkpad line a lot of good press, so I think it was successful in that aspect.

Plan 9 would run well. Netbsd would be solid, particularly if you don't care about X. Openstep if you could find a CD. Minix.

That's an amazing amount of RAM for that era, and OS/2 4.0 would probably run well on it, with no need to hunt for graphics drivers. Get Turbo C or Turbo Pascal for DOS, Word for windows, solid multitasking.

BeOS/intel won't run - that needed pentium arch or above. BeOS would fly on an old pentium thinkpad with that much RAM though. Network stack is patchy, but the media API remains impressive.

There's no way youre using a modern linux distro here. Even something like puppylinux which is designed for "old" computers expects around 256mb of ram.

72mb of ram doesn't get you much nowadays. Maybe you can install Damn Small Linux and get some basic functionality. Someone on /r/sysadmin tried reviving an old 486 laptop recently and I believe he could only get DSL to work, but had significant driver problems. I think he had much less ram, like 16mb or so.

72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily and maybe even Windows 2000 or even XP, though I'm not sure how usable XP would be even if it did boot.

edit: I found someone running puppy on 64meg of ram.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6RmiXoSZaI

72MB isn't terribly small. You can even run X on that (assuming it supports the graphics) and one of the old school window managers. Modern web browsers tend to be massive memory hogs so they might cause problems, but just starting X won't break the bank.

The 133Mhz CPU might actually be more of a problem, especially for stuff like Web Browsers that tend to assume that cpu cycles are free. I've run Chrome on a Raspberry Pi, which is clocked almost 8x higher than this laptop and feels sluggish at best. You would probably be better off X-Displaying a browser from somewhere else and using the box mostly for terminals and SSH sessions.