Cracking Open: The IBM ThinkPad 701c

The classic IBM ThinkPad logo. The ThinkPad brand is now owned by Lenovo.

The left hand side of the unit. From left to right, you can see the power jack and the On/Off switch. Behind the rubber cover you can barely see, there's a connector for an external floppy drive. After that you can see the phone jack for the internal 14.4Kbps modem. There are also jacks for headphones and speakers.

Here's the right side of the unit. The battery slides out from the far left. You can see two empty PCMCIA slots on the far right.

The rear of the unit. The black rectangle in the center is the IRDA infrared port. As you can see, there is no Ethernet jack anywhere on the unit. You must use a PCMCIA Ethernet card.

Behind the slider in the lower left part of the unit is the connector for an external dock/port replicator.

The bottom of the unit. You can see the access door for extra RAM in the center.

Here's IBM's barcode inventory tag. The machine is a type 2630-5TU aka IBM ThinkPad 701c.

The front of the unit. You can see the keyboard latches on the far left and right.

The magic of the 701c. As the unit opens, you can see the keyboard unfold.

The 701c keyboard fully expanded. As you can see, it's a full-size keyboard which overhangs the sides of the unit by about an inch on either side.

IBM didn't compromise on the keyboard even though it has a unique butterfly feature. It has the same look and feel that made the ThinkPads popular. You can even see the TrackPoint device used by the ThinkPad line in place of a touchpad.

The ThinkPad 701c running Windows 95.

The System Properties screen in Windows 95. You can see the name of the person we bought it from off of Ebay. This unit has 16Mb of RAM and a 486 CPU.

The RAM compartment for the 701c.

There's one RAM slot in the unit. When you remove the extra RAM you can see the original 8Mb of RAM which is soldered on the motherboard.

This is an 8MB 70ns SODIMM memory module. The 701c could take a maximum of one additional 32Mb SODIMM which would max out the unit's memory at 40Mb.

The battery slides out of the side of the unit.

The battery is as wide as the entire laptop.

Before the introduction NiMH or Lithium Ion batteries which are common today, laptops in the mid 90's were powered by Nickel Cadmium rechargables.

NiCads degraded over time and developed a 'memory' where they wouldn't fully recharge after time. The battery for our laptop doesn't hold a charge anymore and the unit must be plugged in to run.

You can see the manufacture date of this battery on the bottom - 9501, meaning January 1995.

Here's the hard drive sliding out of the unit.

IBM was one of the first users of the 2.5" form factor for hard drives. This is a 540Mb drive which was large for the day. The 701c could take a maximum of 720Mb.

The side of the unit showing the empty battery, hard drive and PCMCIA slots.

Here's a closeup of the recessed chassis screw. It's a

Here's a close up of the

We could however remove the lid and backplane to show the mechanism that controls the butterfly keyboard.

You can see the sliders at the top of the unit which guides the two halves of the keyboard. You can also see two ribbon cables that attach each half of the keyboard to the system board.

As you can see the keyboard is spring loaded with a slider mechanism which moves the keyboard along the track as you lift the lid.

Here you can see a closeup of the ribbon cable on the left that connects the traveling keyboard to the system board.

At the top right, you can see the metal posts that connect the top and bottom of the laptop's lid. You can also see the LED panel across the top which indicates power and hard drive activity.