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Fascinating. So he's loaded a full instance of Dos/Win3.1 onto the chip used for the Thinkpad's BIOS itself? Very cool.

One thing I didn't understand was why it was necessary to dismantle the laptop as shown in the first pic. Some more details around that would be useful. Presumably something about getting around the flashing limitations if one was to attempt it purely from a software approach?

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Taking the thinkpad apart is part of flashing the bios, which usually is just clipping an SOIC8 clip to the bios chip and using CH341a SPI usb programmer to flash it. I did the same to my thinkpad x220 to flash it with coreboot.

Thanks for that. I was still wondering why the flashing couldn't be achieved on a running system as-per the usual method of updating the proprietary manufacturer's BIOS. I found this key quote on the Coreboot web site:

There are various protection schemes that make it impossible to modify or replace a firmware from a running system. coreboot allows to disable these mechanisms, making it possible to overwrite (or update) the firmware from a running system.

Usually you must use the external method once to install a retrofitted coreboot and then you can use the internal method for future updates.

https://doc.coreboot.org/tutorial/flashing_firmware/index.ht...

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