This is like ASMR for Hackers: restoration specialist [Polymatt] has put together a video of his work restoring a 1995 IBM Thinkpad 701c, the famous butterfly keyboard laptop. It’s an incredible bit of restoration, with a complete teardown and rebuild, even including remaking the decals and rubber feet.
[Polymatt] runs Project Butterfly, an excellent site for those who love these iconic laptops, offering advice and spare parts for restoring them. In this video, he does a complete teardown, taking the restored laptop completely apart, cleaning it out, and replacing parts that are beyond salvaging, like the battery, and replacing them. Finally, he puts the whole thing back together again and watches it boot up. It’s a great video that we’ve put below the break and is well worth watching if you wonder about how much work this sort of thing involves: the entire process took him over two years.
We’ve covered some of his work in the past, including the surprisingly complicated business of analyzing and replacing the Ni-Cad battery that the original laptop used.
[Via BoingBoing]
Watching him disconnect those ancient ribbon cables sent a chill up my spine!
The plastic can be so brittle after nearly 3 decades.
…”replacing parts that are beyond salvaging, like the battery, and replacing them. ”
At the risk of sounding like a grammar nazi, I think this could be phrased better.
We did it right cause we did it twice
Did he protected the white decals? It seems that they are not protected and even one of the triangles/arrow heads (pointing for a switch) lost a corner.
IBM thinkpad, they were certainly built to last, I have a T61p and a T430, but lenovo never matched the quality of IBM.
I was bracing for the pain of him gutting and putting a pi in it
I’m predicting it now, if they ever make the folding OLED screen for a laptop they will bring back the butterfly keyboard 🤣
They’ve already made the folding OLED laptop, but it just has an on screen keyboard or a bluetooth keyboard, sadly.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkpad-x1-fold/
Polymatt’s adventure reviving the IBM 701C inspired me to go digging in my retrocomputing archaeological ruins, and I found my own old 701C. Fortunately I was easily able to remove the battery, but the connectors were unsurprisingly corroded, and I don’t know what other disasters are to be found inside the case. So before I attempt to open the case–and probably do other damage–I wonder if there are those who are willing to do repairs on parts of broken 701Cs?