The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
jdhodges.com
jdhodges.com
Getting a bit geriatric now, but we've had fun.[1]
They get the memory and disk extensibility, replaceable battery, dual GPUs, with the dedicated GPU being a good mix of performance, OpenGL/DX/Vulkan capabilities and battery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...
Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!
More about Ted's work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576
Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:
https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724
He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.
I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)
The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.
----
Here's what Ted wrote about some of the other people involved with the Thinkpad and Trackpoint design, and his canine envy:
Ted> Actually i called it a joy nub (smaller than a joystick) and even made many vibrating joy nubs....
in fact i was flattered when Richard sapper decided to change it from a keyboard color to red and IBM came up with the marketing slogan "so hot we had to make it red"
In fact Bob Olyha and Joe Rutledge worked really hard to put a 5 position gesture recognizer in the firmware of the trackpoints that are sold today (N,S,E, W and press)! (three d gestures were a fun challenge)
Joe Rutledge, Barton Smith and Bob Olyha are the best contacts for software questions.
The keyboards can be purchased easily
I made many prototypes, many with force feedback and two handed scenarios, etc. the russian tea mouse was a special one which allowed a velcro on trackpoint the size of a thumb, nested in a mouse shaped object and a cover allowing for gross control from any movement of a large part of the body.
The scollmouse (a poormans trackpoint scroller) was sold as a product that outperformed wheels for pointing (not a real strain gauge based pointing stick)
Don> Didn't your dad help you design the material you made the original trackpoint out of?
Ted> He did. (chlorinated butyl rubber)
Don> Has airport security ever gotten suspicious of you carrying around a big sack of trackpoint nubs?
Ted> i am jealous of the 6 nipples dogs have aren't you.
Don> The virtual laptop sounds like a program that came with my old 90 mhz Thinkpad -- I think Ted Selker worked on it. It had a photorealistic virtual view of the laptop that you could turn around in different directions to see the various parts labeled, and it was integrated with documentation and status displays and control panels related to all the gadgets and interface plugs. For example, you could bring up the volume control panel by clicking on the speaker, and stuff like that!
Ted> YEP, i tried to get rid of the book and irq setting the lpt1 grids of buttons.... i can't find our "best ideas" here is an early crappy image or two....
here is how we deployed it (still has problems)
also i came up with an idea called wrapping paper instructions which never got deployed: no text
it showed how to open the laptop, put in the battery, use the ultrabay, remove the disk, open the keyboard to get to stuff, turn on the computer, plug in the computer, and use the notebook latches.
I understand people loving heavy duty ones. But the ones I have run into in the past had poorer screens and were just clunky to carry around. What’s the trade off here? Why do people still want a Thinkpad.
Edit: I just thought of one reason, some specs are not available in Ideapads due the power consumption and cooling needs I think. So Thinkpads on the lower end aren’t worth it?
For desktops, it's ThinkCentre Tiny all the way.
I'm typing this on a T14 Gen 2 Ryzen 7 Pro 32GB/512GB I picked up last year for $220. For my work bag I just bought a T14 Gen 3 i5-1250P 32GB/512GB WWAN for $370 that looks new.
I'm pushing folks to buy now - anything they'll need in the next 2 years. I'm convinced Ramageddon is trickling down into the (>3yo) used market. Ebay prices already seem up a bit from a few months ago.
ThinkPad was a very expensive taste. The key to being affordable to a poor student or open source developer was to acquire gently-used older models, keep them working, and run Linux. All useful skills, which I still apply.
At MIT, Ted Selker (TrackPoint inventor mentioned in the article) had some retail boxes of the IBM SpaceSaver II TrackPoint keyboard on a shelf in his office, and one time he casually offered to give me one. I had to decline, since I craved that exact keyboard, knew exactly how much they cost, and couldn't accept such an expensive gift. They still fetch a good price used, and their looks aged pretty well (the alternative at the time was almost certainly a beige or light gray 104-key): https://www.ebay.com/itm/227342514769
Even as a financially secure mid-career engineer this is still an excellent formula. Buy a "retired" Thinkpad on Ebay, upgrade RAM and NVMe if needed, replace battery if needed, then run it for a decade or more.
I started to see some poor-quality 'genuine' replacement ThinkPad keyboards. Bad action, bad fit of assembly with keycap catching on bezel, etc.
I considered it not-unlikely that no more good ones would be made, since Lenovo had stopped selling laptops that used that part.
So I stockpiled some good ones while I could, by sampling from a diversity of sellers. I wound up with 3 good spares, and 2 bad.
The workstations might have replaceable RAM but like apple some the x line and t line (I think?) have RAM soldered on so no upgrades :(
[...]
In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. `
He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product.
He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from.
IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks.
The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem.
The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop.
He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area.
So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved.
The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen.
They did lots of user studies and took lots of measurements and performed lots of experiments to determine the best parameters for the pressure-to-speed transfer function, and finally came up with one that was measurably good enough to make IBM happy and ship in products.
So after pooh-pooh-ing the name "Joy Button", IBM finally settled on and trademarked the name "Trackpoint." But one concession they made, was when they published a two page ad spread in Time Magazine with a close-up of the trackpoint, above the slogan "So hot, we had to make it red!"
Another crazy but brilliant innovation he developed was the Thinkpad 755CV [9] that you could remove the back of the LCD screen and lay it down on an overhead projector to project the video! Nobody probably remembers overhead projectors any more, but they were very popular at the time, and that feature could save you a lot of money, and you never had to reboot it three times just to get the video on the projector, like with modern laptops!
[9] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:755CV
He also made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO hot red trackpoints on the keyboard, which invitingly resembled a pair of nipples. It was very popular with everyone he tested it on, but unfortunately OS/2 had no idea how to cope with two pointing devices, so there wasn't much use for it, besides being a wonderful ice breaker at parties.
I don't know if his lab is the one that invented the butterfly keyboard, but it was another in a long line of wonderful innovative ideas that were coming out of IBM's research labs and showing up in the Thinkpad at the time.
I learned about this stuff from the talks and demos he gave at his NPUC - New Paradigms for Using Computers [10] workshop that he produced at IBM Alameda Research Labs. [11] -- it was a really great free workshop, including free lunch, with people like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy!
[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw
[...]
From the transcript:
Ted> One of the most interesting things that we learned with the two track points -- might have one around, I don't know, anyway -- was that instead of putting them symmetrically for the two hands between the J K and M and between the D F and C for example, we put one of them in...
Ted> We offset them in some of the experiments, and what we found is if they were in different positions relative to each other on the different keyboards. You could you could remember which one was which much better so you wouldn't get confused. You know, the artist often moves a piece of paper around with one hand and marks it up with the other. So that's an example of what I wanted two Trackpoints for.
Maybe that's why Bryon Noem points his nipples in different directions like Kash Patel's drunken lazy googly eyes ("not that there's anything wrong with that"), so he can remember which is which!
Since I first met Ted at CHI'88 in Washington DC, he's always been into pie menus! I presented this paper about them at that conference:
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus; Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser (*) and Ben Shneiderman; ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (1988-2018):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
The video transcript continues:
Ted> Well, just to give you an example, there's a gesture language built into the firmware. The idea was that how you put your pressure on it -- we made a whole language so that it would be possible to just use the TrackPoint to do all these gestural things to make things happen. We tried to expose it. I doubt it's easy to get your hands on it from any software place on your computer now, but maybe it is.
Ted> So yeah, there's a little gesture language built in, and if anybody asked me I probably could go dig up what the... I think you send two characters to it, an A1 for example. I don't know, it's a long time ago, but I'd have to go find out. But yeah, so there's a whole gesture language built into it.
Ted> And then at one point I wanted so badly to make the thing vibrate that one of my cutest ideas was -- back before stereo -- I took the speaker, and you could still do it with one, I took the speaker and put it right underneath the TrackPoint. Then I modified the speaker with a little piece of plastic on its voice coil, and I made some electronics so that if you sent it a signal at a low frequency you could use it as a solenoid.
Ted> So the same piece of hardware, the same speaker that could make high fidelity sound, had this little pin sticking above it that you'd never run into when you're making noise, but if you ran that voice coil bam up against it, you'd tap the finger. I got that all working.
Ted> And then when that didn't make them happy, I designed a TrackPoint -- this is 140 thousandths of an inch in diameter, that post coming out of the strain gauges -- and I built a coil into it and put a fancy magnet in there so it became its own solenoid. I didn't like that as much.
Ted> I was much more proud of this speaker turning into a solenoid, because that literally only cost a transistor, whereas making a real solenoid in that tiny post was a little more expensive. But in any case, I never got those into product, though I'd still love it. No kidding.
Ted> In fact, what was impressive to me is we came up with this whole understanding of what makes sense to feel. If you're just going zoom across the screen, you're 30,000 feet up, you don't need to feel the texture of every pixel that's on and off. When you're coming into a window at a slower speed, you kind of want to feel that there's a scroll bar, but not the details of that. When you go into the scroll bar, right then you feel it. Or when you're looking at text, feeling every character is interesting. Oh wow.
Ted> I had so much fun thinking about this. One problem I have with being honest is that I did a little study -- you know, I don't get around to everything, but I do some -- that showed that for learning, the haptics was very important.
Ted> The problem is that for learning how to use a TrackPoint, you learn within 45 seconds you're better than a mouse for text editing, but after 40 minutes you're better than a mouse for everything. So the point is, well, if you get better than everything in 40 minutes, why do we need this haptics? Let's not waste the money.
Here's some more email correspondence between us about that, during the OLPC project, when he was at MIT Media Lab, and we were collaborating on the OLCP design:
Don> Ted, I added a comment to the OLPC bug #369, "Incompatibilities between trackpad precision and the current rollover UI design", and added you as the CC: address. (Maybe you don't want to be CC'ed about every change to that bug, so I'll remove your address from the CC field if you prefer.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20201104094105/http://dev.laptop...
Incompatibilities between trackpad precision and the current rollover UI design
Don> Consider using pie menus, which are based purely on the direction of motion, and exploit Fitts' law by putting each menu item target adjacent to the cursor, but in a different direction, with a large pie-slice shaped area (which extends to the screen edge). Since pie menus are based on direction instead of distance, and the targets are large and wedge-shaped, the mouse acceleration actually increases the user's control over the direction by quickly moving the cursor out further away from the menu center, giving them more "leverage" and angular precision.
Don> Also: Please talk to Ted Selker (selker@media.mit.edu) about all his work that went into developing the Trackpoint's mapping from pressure to mouse motion. The transfer function (pressure => cursor speed mapping curve) has two plateaus: one at the low end at "fine positioning" speed, and one at the high end just below "eye tracking" speed, so moderately quick motion does not move the cursor too fast for the eye to follow. Of course it has to be adjusted for the fine resolution of the OLPC screen, and the properties of the touch pad. Perhaps somebody could develop an X extension that implemented a smarter kind of mouse acceleration behavior, that can be configured with any curve. Note that IBM has patented the Trackpoint hardware and transfer function, so check with Ted about what's allowed, or if IBM will donate rights to use the patent to the OLPC project.
Ted> Don, thanks for the nod, the transfer function on the Trackpoint is actually quite fancy (it has a different affordances for pixel selection (plateau), character selection (plateau), "thing" selection (~maximum of eye speed) and window selection (turbo) it also has "negative inertia to speed stops and starts", its achilles heel... Bad mechanical decisions makes it have a sensor problem that makes it always try to assess finger off to recalibrate....
Ted> It also has a gesture recognizer built in with the dynamics of finger press, NSWE that are accessible from the api. The api also lets you get your hands on the 16bit A/D converters to make things like the "science" education wand physics teaching stuff that we used to show around.
OLCP Sugar Pie Menus Discussion:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/olpc-sugar-pie-menu-discussion...
>Excerpts from the discussion on the OLPC Sugar developer discussion list about pie menus for PyGTK and OLPC Sugar.
The OLPC pie menu thread picked up exactly where the TrackPoint discussion leaves off: input devices are not just pointing devices, they are little languages. Bug #369 was about the mismatch between the XO's touchpad precision and Sugar's rollover-heavy UI, but the discussion quickly widened into a concrete design proposal: use pie menus because they depend on direction rather than distance, give the user big forgiving targets, exploit Fitts' law, and turn common commands into learnable gestures.
Eben saw how pie menus could fit Sugar: contextual object actions, activity-level commands, and especially handheld mode, where four or eight menu directions map naturally onto the XO's game-pad buttons. Marco pushed back in the right places: implementation cost, screen-edge behavior, global-vs-contextual confusion, and the danger of hiding bad interface design in an "advanced" menu. My response was basically: prototype it, feel it, and keep the model crisp. Pie menus work best when they are predictable, spatially stable, self-revealing for beginners, and fast enough for experts to "mouse ahead" without waiting for the menu to draw.
That is also why Ted's TrackPoint work fits so well here. His pressure curves, plateaus, gesture recognizer, and haptic experiments were all about shaping raw motion into meaningful action. The OLPC pie menu discussion was the same design problem from the other side: how to make a small, cheap, imprecise input device feel precise, memorable, forgiving, and fun.
Before I went to MIT as a student (almost the same time as Ted Selker arrived as a new professor/researcher), Mark Weiser offered me a job at PARC (new project he was doing on ubiquitous computing, which I really should've joined).
Now I know why.
for you t460 is just a webserver, while for me t470s is my state of the art sole machine...
IMO youu undervalue the magic and robustness of those laptops.
1. It's black. I used a laptop that was silver and white for years; it sucked. Being boring, non-flashy, and non-reflective is important to me since I get to use this computer in places where the lighting is outside of my control.
2. It has a 15" screen. That's the right size for me. (I do not care that it is larger heavier and heavier than alternatives; that part isn't on my radar.)
3. The keyboard is centered. It accomplishes this in part by lacking a numeric keypad. (I do not use numeric keypads because I grew up with an 85-key XT keyboard that could have a numeric keypad, or cursor keys, but not both at once...and I chose cursor keys.)
4. Ports. I often connect my laptop to other things. That's an important part of how I find utility with laptop computers.
5. I found it very cheap on eBay with a housing that still looked very minty.
It's been a fine machine. CPU and RAM are maxed out (amusingly, the cheapest way I found to get the best CPU was to buy the whole bottom half of another T530 that already had one installed, so now I've got spare parts). The cheap third-party battery works for most of a workday in testing, and I've never run out when away from an outlet. It's lovely.
It's hard to find anything more-recent that meets these requirements, but maybe I'll be able to score a used Framework 16 or something at some point.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad
is highly recommended.
Also, Jerry Kaplan's wonderful:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
touches a bit on the early history of it as a pen computer project.
Still have my ThinkPad 755c, and still a bit bummed that I was never able to get OpenSTEP to run on it. (It's worth noting that when David Pogue complained of Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad after the purchase of NeXT by Apple that it was running NeXTstep and not Windows 95 as he claimed.)
Really wish the Lenovo Yogabook 9i was a ThinkPad model (so that it would have a Trackpoint) and that it used Wacom EMR stylus technology --- wouldn't've been able to resist that.
I really wish the Legion Go (2) was a ThinkPad detachable with Wacom EMR, IPS display, a keyboard folio with trackpoint, a removable battery, and a Switch-style dock.
The last one is the one I'm most disappointed with. The battery dropped to 75% of max charge in a month and it heats up quite quickly. I don't expect my next one to be a Thinkpad.
I was able to upgrade the RAM of the P14s, by buying one with 1 soldered DIMM and one empty slot.
The build quality has improved over the past 5 generations or so. It was getting too plastic-y and felt brittle. Nothing like the original thinkpads though, those were built like bricks.
All the Mac issued hardware that I touch are project assigned if it must be, and never managed to win my heart to switch.
> ThinkPad is not dominant in the 2026 AI-laptop conversation. The Apple Silicon competitor class leads on raw inference per watt.
Alone the facts that I can expand memory after acquisition, have native access to GL 4.6, Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate, with a CUDA GPU trumps that.
After I returned I was immediately annoyed by the shit hinge, but pleased by the keyboard. ThinkPad keyboards are so nicer than MacBooks. Plastic is just nicer to the touch than metal. If Hackintosh was still possible I'd want a ThinkPad with an upgraded screen running MacOS
I'm typing this on a ThinkPad and don't particularly care for the plastic. I much, much preferred the aluminum of my otherwise cheaper-feeling EliteBooks and my 2013 MBP before them.
A friend used to have some XPS, and that thing was atrocious. It felt like a weird combination of mushy and sticky. I hated touching it. The ThinkPad isn't nearly as bad (yet?), but it's clearly something I'd change on it in a heartbeat if possible.
However I don't like at all their approach to hardware design, trying to be the Bang & Olufsen (or whatever) of computer world, in detriment of expansability.
I rather keep my beige PC hardware kind of analogy.