Unfortunately, mine has no builtin CD-ROM, floppy drive, ethernet, serial, or parallel port, so I have no way to get any data onto or off the thing. It has Windows 95 and Office 95 installed, and that is it. Looks like it's been hardly used.
I keep it around for the nostalgia boost, but I can't do anything with it.
None of them had any of those things.
USB had not been invented yet, and writable optical disks were fantastically high end kit that cost more than the whole laptop. 100Mbs Ethernet was relatively new and not that common yet; at home, I still used 10Mb/s thin Ethernet because it was much cheaper than UTP Ethernet, which needed powered hubs.
The cheap'n'nasty Acer-made Thinkpad i1200 series that replaced my TP701 in 2001 didn't have a floppy, serial or Ethernet, either, and only USB 1. But it did have Cardbus.
That stuff was all left out of 1990s laptops to keep the cost down.
For my TP701, I have an external floppy drive, but I also have PCMCIA SCSI for a SCSI CD-ROM drive, and PCMCIA Ethernet for networking, and a PCMCIA modem for Internet dialup while I was abroad.
And of course the machine has not 1 but 2 PCMCIA slots, so you can use any 2 of those at once.
Find a cheap old PCMCIA Ethernet card -- not wifi, that's too new -- and plug it into an old 10/100 hub. (I picked one out of the trash a few months ago, just in case.) Plug that hub into a modern Ethernet switch.
If Windows 95 doesn't have drivers, pull the hard disk, stick it on a $5 EIDE-to-USB 2 cable, and copy the Win95 install CABs onto the hard disk from a modern computer. Maybe copy the driver disk too.
Add TCP/IP and the Microsoft Network client, and now it will talk SMB1.
Add IE6, or Opera 10, or Firefox 2, or Netscape 9 and you can also FTP upload and download stuff to it.
Win95 has an email client, or add MS Internet Mail and News, and you can then email stuff on and off it as well.
You can't add USB-anything, because USB needs soft-configurable IRQ and DMA, and that needs PCI, and that needs Cardbus. PCMCIA is ISA in a credit-card format, so USB is impossible. So is Firewire. Both need Cardbus, and you can't retro-fit Cardbus slots.
You can have a PCMCIA Fast Ethernet card. That should autonegotiate a connection to any modern gigabit switch. However, the bandwidth of ISA is massively lower than 100Mb/s so it won't be able to run at the network speed. If you get 15Mb/s out of it, you'll be doing well, and that will max out the CPU.
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.
« 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.
Well, I naively assumed there were docking stations, most of the ThinkPads (most laptops by any vendor, really) I've seen in corporate settings were attached to docking stations. But I only got into IT years later, the Butterfly was a collector's item that the time.
I do like a laptop to be slightly deeper, so I can rest my palms in the front while typing. But it sounds like an interesting design.
There is, or rather was, a port replicator. This thing:
https://www.amazon.com/IBM-MultiPort-Replicator-ThinkPad-Not...
I have one of those, too. I had totally forgotten about it -- my apologies!
The Vaio P sounds interesting? It totally is. That's why I bought one a couple of years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Vaio_P_series
It's so slim that typing on it is fine... but the keyboard is an early chiclet one, with next to no feel, and even the US/UK keyboard layouts have a Japanese key placement, which is weird and constantly confuses me.
Vs it would be neat if they did some kind of restomod, i.e. implant a Raspberry Pi or some small board in there w/ an upgraded screen w/ wifi and bluetooth...
So it's like modern laptops? ;-)