The legend among the laptops came to world 15 years ago. The name itself became a synonym for a robust, sturdy, reliable business laptop. The cult laptop hit the shelves in July 1992 although IBM introduced three months ago that same year. The most interesting fact about ThinkPad is its form: It came to life as a tablet.
The screen was 10-inch monochrome, sporting the usual resolution of that time of 640 x 480 pixels, and it came with 4 MB or 8 MB. The hearth of the first ThinkPad was 386SX processor beating on 20 MHz.

The machine had the serial and parallel ports, modem and external keyboard. The operating system was PenPoint, an OS that Go Corporation devised specifically for the tablets. The "years ahead" technology was the solid-state hard drive with capacity of 20 megabytes. It was long ago before any questions on future of the hard disks and gadgets like MP3 players and today's "We are the first with solid-state drive!" marketing stories.

"The ThinkPad" was soon renamed ThinkPad 700T, and later that same year the younger brothers 700 and 700C hit the stores. However, those were the first clamshell models, a format that will dominate the laptop world for over a decade.

During its long life, the ThinkPad came in many flavours. In 1993 the first IBM "sub-notebook" appeared. Based on much stronger 486 50 MHz processor and huge 170 megabytes hard disk, it had the AC adaptor built in so you had one piece less to carry around. The wearable ThinkPad was introduced in 1998: Small machine with 64 MB of RAM, 340 MB of disk space and "voice-activated interface". The year later we saw "Red Hat-ready" model, but for some reason Linux drivers for its modem wasn't part of the included software.

A year later we say an attempt to colorize the ThinkPad. In October 1999 a model with snap-on covers, ranging from green to blue, was introduced. There was the only possible outcome of that experiment - failure. Because every true fan of ThinkPad follows that old saying: "Paint it any way you like it, as long as it is black".

The year 2000 was the first year that saw the rumour that IBM's considering selling it's PC business, and it was the year of IBM's entering the Linux world with ThinkPad preloaded with it.

Following the state of the art technology, IBM introduced models with Transmeta'a "energy efficient" Crusoe processors, but they weren't so efficient and they disappeared very quickly.

A year later we saw ThinkPad TransNote, a device with paper as an input device. Strange concept - short life. It doesn't live a full year. And the idea of notebook powered by methane... We won't talk about it. The new idea came to daylight in 2002 - security based on the fingerprint. That was much better and now that is a standard, especially on business laptops. We also saw a "Butterfly" keyboard, but that went to history with advent of large LC displays.

After years on thinking and series of better and more powerful models, IBM announced the sale of its PC division to Lenovo in 2004. Good move, as time has shown, since the IBM's quality remained the same under the Chinese company.

And then, the circle was closed: In June 2005 Lenovo announced the new model of ThinkPad that was convertible into a - tablet.

Despite the occasional strange moves and ideas, ThinkPad is "The Laptop". It is robust and reliable, its black color emphasize that, and it will continue to work after falling to the concrete floor. It will be very interesting what will legendary ThinkPad look like in 2022. ■

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