Thinkpads Forum

ThinkPad560X wrote:Okay Thanks. i'll be biding on it.

As they say, a picture say more than a thousand words.

Greetings. The auction ends this weekend. It's still a bargain at its current bid ($316). If you're interested, there's still time to get in on the bidding action. Thanks!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/290834960768?ss ... 1555.l2649

Good afternoon. Glad to see the site restored
The eBay auction for this 850 was an experience! To make a long story short, the item did not sell. If you're interested, send me an offer. I'm in the mood to ship this to somebody soon. Message me here and I'll reply shortly. Thanks!

ThinkPad560X wrote:I found this IBM ThinkPad 850C at a flee market and got for $10.00 It looks similar to a 760 and 820 model. It reads on the front: POWERPC And PowerSeries 850C on the top right of the keyboard like the other ThinkPads. I looked on ThinkWiki and dont see a 850C? Unless this cameout between the 820/850. It looks more like the 820 shape. The drive is on the side and not middle too. It has a small 12" screen and just a floppy in where the CD would be. To me it looks very close to my 760XD but slimer. It boots up and shows a white screen that has the IBM logo on the top right and ThinkPad Power Series on the bottom just like the normal ThinkPad and post boot. Their is no HDD.

Did you ever get to the bottom of what this machine was? I have my suspicions that it would boot from a DOS floppy!

Doesn't look like the 850 I'm familiar with, unless it was an engineering sample.

Should give a trumpet fanfare on power up (check volume wheel), a splash screen similar to in the following photo, and the "BIOS setup" is distinctly 750/760 era but with much more graphical polish. IIRC 3D icons with shadows.



I have a boxed 820 in the office, happy to provide photos if required. I appreciate this is an old post resurrected but ThinkPad 800 series chat is infrequent!

I've run NT3.51, NT4, and AIX on mine. The NT 3.51 is a special IBM version with power management goodies. I have the OS/2 PowerPC beta CD but do not have the requisite 64MB RAM to boot it - the 820 is officially maxed out at 48MB (3x 16MB) and I've never checked what the memory spec is nor whether larger capacities are available/supported.

You need to read up on (and acquire!) ARC diskettes because switching from NT to AIX and back requires a different ARC versions. Can't remember quite where it sits but think of it as something between firmware and boot loader that sits in a reserved partition. Made for an interesting BOOT.INI that differed noticeably from the x86 config, IIRC, and required more thought when setting up multiple partitions. Seem to remember a 4MB FAT boot partition was involved for NT too...

BTW when working at IBM sometime in 1997 I saved an 850 from the crusher. Literally - it was on the conveyor belt in the disposal area. Gave it to a colleague who was into AIX at the time - to say it "put a smile on his face" was something of an understatement...

gator1 wrote:Good afternoon. Glad to see the site restored
The eBay auction for this 850 was an experience! To make a long story short, the item did not sell. If you're interested, send me an offer. I'm in the mood to ship this to somebody soon. Message me here and I'll reply shortly. Thanks!

Spotted it just after it finished, kicked myself for being late but TBH I think the postage to the UK would kill any idea of buying it

Did you manage a sale privately or is it still available?

The 850 is sold. Thanks to everyone for their interest and enthusiasm.

I was the buyer in a private transaction. It powers on and puts out to an external monitor. At first it gave a system board error but I left it plugged in all day and it is booting now to AIX. I suspect the screen is the same as the TFT screen from the 755 series which is easily procured. I understand Windows NT 4.0 Workstation can be installed on it. Anybody here with some advice would be appreciated.

Hi - looks good. I too would guess that it's a 755-era panel, perhaps 755CD/CE rather than the earlier models? I have the HMM for these machines in the box so I'll dig that out too. I'd be tempted to take the panel off it anyway to see what the manufacturer and part numbers are, and what and where the ribbon cable connector is.

I can offer some advice on ARC diskettes and installation of NT 3.51 or 4.0, but not just now as I have some work deadlines looming in the next week. NT PPC is on the install CD, workstation or server, for 3.51 and 4.0. (PPC was largely the .01 between 3.5 and 3.51). Update ARC first if swapping between AIX & NT (either way), then boot CD and go. Prepare yourself for a dual-speed CD-ROM experience though

Network card support is there but you have to look at same era. IBM Etherjet and Token Ring cards are supported, but need to check whether this is full cardbus or just 16 bit PCMCIA.

PM me with your mailing address and I will post you copies of the OS/2 Beta CD and NT 3.51 PMZ (power-managed IBM only build) to play with, images of ARC diskettes, and other useful NT PPC software I have accumulated over time.

Should we start a "ThinkPad 8xx how-to thread" in a more logical home than the Marketplace? With the two of us trying out various installs and configurations on two machines, we may get it reasonably comprehensive!

Give me a week or so and I will be able to put some time towards this

Dan.

Thanks Dan. I found the arc149 diskette image on a mirror of the old IBM ftp server. I tried to extract them on a Windows 98 machine but it keeps saying that it cannot access the a: drive, which is odd. I guess I understand that a regular version of NT 4.0 is not going to work. I plan to open the screen housing this weekend and get the part number off the screen. I am not sure if it is a vga or svga panel but I am betting it is the 800 x 600 panel used in the 755CX model. I have a 755CX, but hate to sacrifice it for the 850.

I think ARC149 will do the trick. You may not even need to apply it - just try to boot from the NT CD. Regular NT4 will work - as long as you have a complete Microsoft CD and not an i386 only 'backup' Look in the root, four architecture-specific directories containing the same filenames: i386, alpha, mips, ppc. IIRC the CD boot image is sufficiently sophisticated to start the installer of the correct architecture, so booting an NT4 CD on your PowerPC machine will recognise it and boot from the ppc directory. I believe this to be correct but it has been a long time, there is a chance that you might have to boot off the ARC disk. This is why I think it would be fun to put together a how-to before the old knowledge fades

Some teasers for you, taken just now as I walked past where it lives:






Enjoy

hwattys wrote:I plan to open the screen housing this weekend and get the part number off the screen. I am not sure if it is a vga or svga panel but I am betting it is the 800 x 600 panel used in the 755CX model. I have a 755CX, but hate to sacrifice it for the 850.

Don't sacrifice - enough 755/760 models still pop up on eBay to make parts harvesting do-able with a little patience, just be clear to get the seller to tell you the type-model off the bottom before committing and check on Lenovo's support site.

OK, both the 820 and 850 use the 'black matrix' 65536 colours VGA or SVGA 10.4" panels, so that's shared with - very specifically:
755CD (VGA)
755CE (VGA)
755CX (VGA,SVGA)
760L/LD (VGA)
10.4" 760CD (VGA)

All other 760 variants have 11" or 12" screens. The 755CV/CDV models were plain old active matrix - for the project-through capability apparently. (Probably their backlighting was more suited to the removable upper case cover.) TPVOL2.PDF would also be useful to have to hand - 755/760 HMM.

The only issue you may have with replacement panels is the number of sliders. In the 75x/76x era, 1 slider indicated TFT but 2 sliders indicated DSTN, but you will note that our TFT-equipped 820/850 have 2 sliders. May be handy if you can get a complete upper assembly rather than just panel

These machines have two possible type numbers, depending on whether they were sold through PC Division or RS/6000 Division... 6040 for the 820 and 6042 for the 850 if PCs, can't remember the RS/6000 types - 724x perhaps? If the model number ends in D it looks like they're 800x600; ending in 6 or 7 means 640x480. My 6040-986 is 640x480.

I have a dead 755CD with a screen I can likely harvest or there are several on eBay. The VGA (640 x 480) are much more common than the SVGA. Thanks for all this info. I am going to get this thing up and running. I would even consider using AIX but will have to learn it....assume it is a Unix variant and not too much unlike Linux.

Thats what my Power series ThinkPad 850 looks like. The one in the box. So they did make the 760 style one..

So did IBM use any of their own IBM Processors in there ThinkPads or desktops like they do for Games consoles like the Nintendo GameCube and Wii? Im guessing as it says PowerPC like their processors do. Wounder why they never made all their ThinkPads with their own brand Processors, wouldn't it been cheaper for them then going Intel?

OK, very interesting. I'd always recalled the 850/860 as being 'big', with the chin for speakers and CD-ROM. More photos would be appreciated

PowerPC was an IBM, Motorola, Apple consortium, to try to compete with the Microsoft-Intel near monopoly. I can't remember who owned the fabrication facility, but you can google for PowerPC 603 (as was in these machines) and see variants badged as either IBM or Motorola.

Remember also IBM's foray into the 486SLC - this was (apparently) an in-house design that merged aspects of the 386 processor architecture with 486 architecture. Stall hamstrung with maximum addressable memory of 24MB IIRC, but this was back in the 16-33MHz days when 8MB RAM cost as much as the PC it was going into

After that, they bought Cyrix, and for a while developed and manufactured Pentium-equivalent processors. Again this was back in the days when MMX was a big deal, and 32MB RAM cost as much as the PC it was going into.

These were back in the days when it was possible to buy a PC with everything IBM-manufactured: planar & chipsets, RAM, CPU, video controller, hard disk controller, network card, BIOS, hard disk, monitor, case, keyboard, mouse... The big change started to come with things like the PC300, and the smaller end of the PC Server line from circa 1995 onwards. Here we started to see 'reference designs' creeping in, whereby both the design and fabrication of significant components such as the planar/chipset/BIOS were farmed out. Following that, various arms got spun-off with various degrees of corporate separation, such as keyboards and printing (Lexmark), storage (to Hitachi), and ultimately PC manufacturing (to Lenovo).

If you look at the big non-Intel chip success story these days, it is the ARM family. ARM have no fabrication facilities, instead they license rights to manufacture their designs, and plough this royalty cash into R&D. Smart move, hindsight would say.

ETA: from memory the following used IBM-manufactured processors, but we're largely back in obscuresville

N33slc (possibly N33sx as a licensed 386)
TP 700,710,720,730 (believe these were IBM SL/SLC 386/486 variants)
PS/2 Model 56 or 77
PS/2e
Some PS/VP
Some late PS/1 & early Aptiva
'BlueLightning' upgrades for PS/2 and PS/VP

TBH it's hurting the brain cells trying to dredge this up and I can't say there's any great accuracy.

Remember also that the VoiceType hardware and MWave chips were DSP technology designed & manufactured by IBM. Again, VoiceType cards were hugely expensive when they first came out - think $2,000 against a $3,500 ThinkPad 755.

A bit more on Wikipedia here, usual caveats regarding accuracy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8048 ... -like_CPUs

I found a replacement screen and installed it....still no video to the screen. Not sure where to go now. I doubt I can find a motherboard.

hows the LCD ribbon? the old ThinkPads I fixed from those years tended to crack. And if it is the LCD ribbon, probably could look at 755-760 models and see if they used the same LCD ribbon/cable.

The ribbon is made out of metal and looks pretty robust. It is unlike any other Thinkpad display ribbon I have ever seen. The inverter cable does look a bit suspect however. The screen I bought had one attached but it is much shorter, as if this screen was used in other models. I will post some pictures.

Very excited to receive today my very own ThinkPad 850!

Got it from the UK, in very good condition. There's just some minor pumps and scratches on the external cover, the inside of the laptop looks almost new. Keyboard and trackpoint show almost no wear from use. It is just missing the rear connector covering door as well as the battery cover. I did not had any information on the configuration, turns out it is maxed out with 1.2GB hard drive and 96MB of RAM. Rear sticker reads Type 7249-851, made 08/96, so this would be a ThinkPad 851 (would the difference between 850 and 851 the built in options?). Unit is rated 20V @ 2.5A, a whopping 50W, quite large for laptops of its days. The original owner told me the display was working a few weeks ago, and then turned black, so it needs to be fixed. I managed to get the screen back twice, and it also displays on an external monitor, powers on fine and boots AIX 4.

Rest of the story with entire teardown and photos on the vintage computer forum
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum ... post290494

pianowizard wrote:CORRECTION: I just learned that there was a Dell Inspiron 7500 with 15.4" 1280x1024, i.e. the 770Z wasn't "the only laptop ever to have a 5:4 aspect ratio" as I claimed above. Such exotic laptops!

I know this is an old post, but I'm commenting anyway... Besides numerous 7500s with SXGA displays, I've also seen a monster-sized Acer laptop that had a 5:4 SXGA display, 3.5" desktop hard drive, and desktop memory DIMMs! No joke! It was cool, but we couldn't keep it around at the shop -- the motherboard was bad and it was just taking up space. Getting back to ThinkPads, I would love to own such a 770Z. The closest thing I have right now is a 770E with a DVD-ROM drive.