Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink

Collecting retrocomputers is fun, especially when you find fully-functional examples that you can plug in, switch on, and start playing with. Meanwhile, others prefer to find the damaged examples and nurse them back to health. [polymatt] can count himself in that category, as evidenced by his heroic rescue of an 1993 IBM ThinkPad Tablet.

The tablet came to [polymatt] in truly awful condition. Having been dropped at least once, the LCD screen was cracked, the case battered, and all the plastics were very much the worse for wear. Many of us would consider it too far gone, especially considering that replacement parts for such an item are virtually unobtainable. And yet, [polymatt] took on the challenge nonetheless.

Despite its condition, there were some signs of life in the machine. The pen-based touch display seemed to respond to the pen itself, and the backlight sort of worked, too. Still, with the LCD so badly damaged, it had to be replaced. Boggling the mind, [polymatt] was actually able to find a 9.4″ dual-scan monochrome LCD that was close enough to sort-of fit, size-wise. To make it work, though, it needed a completely custom mount to fit with the original case and electromagnetic digitizes sheet. From there, there was plenty more to do—recapping, recabling, fixing the batteries, and repairing the enclosure including a fresh set of nice decals.

The fact is, 1993 IBM ThinkPad Tablets just don’t come along every day. These rare specimens are absolutely worth this sort of heroic restoration effort if you do happen to score one on the retro market. Video after the break.

10 thoughts on “Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink

  1. if you can find it there is a landfill full of these out in the Nevada desert. They are probably in about the same shape as this one started out if you dig them up. I would have thought it was pointless to do so but hey, now there’s a nice guide in how to restore them from there. If this sort of old tech is your thing go for it! There’s an old man named Spud who works at Johnnie’s Car Care Center in Roswell, NM. He’ll tell you where to find the landfill so long as you promise that any you retrieve, you will check the back for his name and bring it to him if you find his old one. He had something important to himself on there.

    Good Luck!

    1. Now this is the kind of post I come to Hackaday’s comment section for. I’ll be around Nevada sometime next year, and a Google search tells me that Johnnie’s Car Care is a real place – maybe I’ll track down Spud and a Thinkpad for myself.

  2. Ah the 730t… I used to have the whole kit with the docking station etc., even a big customized briefcase that had another docking station and a printer mounted inside, which I got on ebay around the turn of the century. One idea was I wanted to be able to read PDFs and make handwritten annotations at the same time, with an open-source application that in my limitless optimism I figured would be little trouble to write (although, TBH I’m not sure if the open source world has good coverage of this feature even now). I forgot what else I was thinking. But it was very limiting that it required PCMCIA storage: there was no other option for an internal hard drive. PCMCIA hard drives existed, but they were expensive and hard to find, and smaller than the normal hard drives of the time. (So of course I spent too much on the biggest one that was made at the time. 512MB if memory serves?) Of course I wanted to run Linux on it. Booting with a ramdisk was not so common in distros back then, but a customized one seemed like the only way to go; normally for pcmcia support you need something besides the kernel, so mounting the pcmcia disk as root wasn’t possible without having a ramdisk underneath. Whereas one could boot DOS first, and then use syslinux. I think I’ve forgotten some details since then… but basically I never really got anywhere with it, and gave up spending more time on it at some point. I think I resold everything on ebay in 2010 or 2011.

    Before that, I had some even-older IBM stylus tablet machines that I had gotten in 1998 or so. And did even less with them: they were even more underpowered, like a 386 with 2MB RAM or something like that. Also resold on ebay later on. I don’t remember if I ever found out the model number. They were thick, maybe 5cm or so, with heavy aluminum frames, and completely wrapped in rubber; probably meant to survive being dropped. The display was smaller, 10″ or so greyscale VGA.

    Before that, there was the Dauphin DTR-1: at least I got some use out of that one. I hated that it had such a fragile stylus which required 3 stacked coin cells inside, and those didn’t last very long either. It had a 20MB “kitty hawk” disk (world’s smallest hard disk at the time) and 6MB RAM (mine was the upgraded one! 2MB was standard). It was actually my first laptop, working well enough to bother trying to actually use sometimes. It had a built-in fax modem too: I actually sent a fax with it once. I didn’t try to install Linux on it, because there wasn’t enough space that I had any hope of dual-booting, and the only removable storage was the external floppy drive that came with it (with its own weird floppy connector that wasn’t used on any other machine that I’ve ever seen).

    1. (although, TBH I’m not sure if the open source world has good coverage of this feature even now)

      It’s one of those things that everyone thinks they need, but then don’t actually use even if they had it. It just never works well enough to replace actual paper.

  3. I have a 730TE which to my knowledge works without issue. Inclduing carrying strap, pen, and protective case. Batteries have been removed to prevent damage. though I am missing a docking station or at least the pinout to attach external mouse and keyboard, as well as external Floppy. would love to get it all running again.

  4. Obscure? I worked ThinkPad support in Raleigh from 1995 until 1997 and even I’ve never seen one of these things. I’m guessing the DSTN display was similar to the ThinkPad 360 PE that was much more popular but also pen-based with PC-DOS and Windows 3.1.

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