Why I miss IBM, and why my money’s on Dell.
Written by Fred Brown
IBM T30 Thinkpad / Thinkpads aboard the International Space Station
Serial ports and parallel ports remind me of years gone by – of a switch box to select a printer and floppy discs to move data around. Cars with onboard diagnostics, it seems, still use serial ports – and so I found myself on eBay in search of a used PC laptop that could ‘talk’ to my (frequently poorly) BMW. I could sketch almost every incarnation of Apple’s Powerbook from the 3400c through Wall Street G3, Titanium G4 until the MacBook Pro of today – and argue the case for their inclusion in any museum of industrial design – but a PC laptop? If there was an iconic design among the 8,148 laptops listed then I couldn’t remember it.
You realise you are a geek when you find yourself strangely excited by wading through people’s cast off laptops (viewing eBay’s list by ‘time ending soonest’ helps). But it was on another site that I saw the link ‘RS232 computers’. (If you think DOS is something you do at the weekend then those characters specify a serial port, the things we used to use before USB came along). For sale were a war chest of IBM T series laptops. Now I remember those machines for having a nipple instead of a trackpad and as anyone in the design profession knows that is no way to operate Word let alone Photoshop. They were not, therefore, on my radar. But if you look past the nipple you find a design that has stood the test of time far better than any of its contemporaries. And build quality that means they are still around, and still valuable. Why?
As ever, Wikipedia has the answer. Product of a collaboration between corporate head of the IBM design programme Tom Hardy and industrial design legend Richard Sapper, the ThinkPad is a monument to the realisation that design can be a powerful differentiator in any market; a design that is somehow so ‘right’ that it makes a modern Sony Viao look ever so slightly off the pace. No wonder Nasa’s astronauts took them on the Space Shuttle. These things are cool. They are also from IBM, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of a brand that, now it has departed the PC market, I find I quite miss.
They even made the machine for me – a 2002 ThinkPad T30 – the only model that came with a trackpad and a serial port, and mine is arriving from specialist Viper IT today. I can’t wait.
My tip for the new design leader in the land of PC notebooks? Dell, by a country mile.
