IBM ThinkPad 701C

The "butterfly" ThinkPad 701C went out of production in 1996, but it's still an amazingly cool piece of engineering—a real "desert island" computer. That's one of mine hard at work in the photo above.

The ThinkPad 701C I'm using now—my second—originally came with 16 MB of RAM and a 720-MB hard drive. I've since replaced 8 MB of the original memory with a 32-MB SO-DIMM, for a total of 40 MB of RAM. I bought the memory from Bill Morrow's thinkpads.com site. Bill offers fast, friendly service, and unlike some vendors, he has no problem with shipping to foreign addresses.

I also replaced the original 720-MB hard-disk drive with a 2.1-GB drive (2.5", 12.7 mm) from Toshiba, then later with a 6.1-GB drive I mail-ordered from Bill Morrow. This gave me plenty of room for installing PC-DOS J7.0/V, DR-DOS 7.03, the Japanese version of OS/2 Warp Connect, and the English version of OS/2 Warp 4.0. IBM's Boot Manager, which comes with OS/2 Warp, is used to choose an operating system at boot-up.

OS/2 Warp runs beautifully on the ThinkPad 701C—in fact, most of the pages on this web site were originally created and tested on the TP701.

The TP701's hibernation file normally must reside on a FAT drive, but Tim Sipples has come up with a REXX program that puts it on an HPFS partition. You can get the program from his web site (see the links below), or here. (If you want to save the program to your local disk, most browsers will let you do so by holding down the Shift key as you click on the link.)

Occasionally the battery gauge on the ThinkPad 701 may get stuck on "full" when the battery is actually empty. Here's a small DOS program for correcting this problem that a kind soul posted to the THINKPADS-L mailing list: 701reset.zip.

Other ThinkPad 701C sites:

• Tim Sipples's page on Using OS/2 Warp 4 on an IBM ThinkPad 701C (Note: Tim's site is now down but may be up again later at a new site.)
• IBM Personal Computing Support—ThinkPad 701C links
• IBM's ftp repository for ThinkPad-related stuff. Some files in this repository of particular interest to butterfly users:
  • ThinkPad 701 Tips & Tricks (text file, approx. 23 kB)
  • Features and specs for withdrawn ThinkPads (PDF file, approx. 700 kB)
  • Hardware Maintenance Manual Volume 2, which covers the 701x series (PDF file, approx. 3.7 MB)
• Unofficial archives of the ThinkPad mailing list (up through mid-1988)
• Paul Khoury's ThinkPad Assistant (along with other OS/2 stuff)
• Craig's IBM Butterfly Page
• Linux on the Thinkpad 701
• ThinkPad 701C/Cs (2630) Parts
• ThinkPad 701C/Cs (2630) Parts (different site)
• Old IBM-site pages about the ThinkPad 701C
• Yoiko's Butterfly Room
• Linux on the ThinkPad 701 (in Japanese)
• Spec sheet for the Japanese-market butterfly's FD-05 floppy drive (in Japanese)
• Bill Morrow's thinkpads.com site, with information and items for sale for the 701C and other ThinkPads.
• Ty Shrake's wonderful Warped ThinkPad page is no more, but some of the information that was there lives on at Dr. Martinus's NoteBook/2 site (The information on the 701C is now in the section for 486 machines, where it belongs, and not with the Pentium machines.)

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