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Comment by garciansmith | Hacker News Reader

I miss the ThinkLight (and the dual-light idea he had sounds great). Useful when working in a dark environment to look at papers and whatnot, or just to provide a nice amount of ambient light to smooth out the contrast between the screen itself and your surroundings. Most modern laptops have backlit keys, but those don't help in those cases; they are pretty much only useful for people who can't touch type.

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I actually used to work at a place that had regular power outages because it was remote and ran on hydropower. We had a bunch of old think pads with the think light at the time that were standard staff issue, and they were awesome for working on any technology or system stuff when power was out but wireless was on with the UPSs. Such a cool feature and I do wish they still had it. Along with the locking lids, the 430 and 530s were tanklike.

Yeah, it has got me "in the zone" for writing many times. On a side note, I also like the "click" when I close the lid on my T42. Mentally balancing for sure :).

I bought a used P50 for our son, and while it's allright (even the keyboard -- although it doesn't give that particular feel of the T4x era keyboards), it lacks both of those extra-relevant features. No click on closing, and a mere backlit keyboard. But, that's life!

All the ThinkLights I've used were dim, barely brighter than the backlight bleed from the screen. I would have to be in a pitch black room (at night with no light, not even a street light outside) for it to be useful.

Exactly - the light was far more useful than just for illuminating the keyboard

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