Daily Photo

So we had this ancient IBM Thinkpad 560X. A lovely device from 1997, tiny screen but full-sized keyboard that’s very nice to type on. Pentium MMX (not Pentium II, but original Pentium) 233MHz and 96MB memory, expandable to 160MB if you could find the ridiculously rare memory modules that actually worked properly (hit-and-miss per machine).

So it was playing up, so we spotted a pallet of five in the eBay wholesale and job lots (an amazing and frightening place) for £250. Going rate for a 96MB 560X was around £80, so this was probably a good deal even if some were DOA. As it was, all worked perfectly — the photo is of all five of them running memtest86. We sold a couple and kept the rest to play with.

They’re all but useless these days, but the keyboard is so nice. I’m tempted to gut one and wire an Eee 701 into the body.

The title comes from my girlfriend calling her Thinkpad A30p Servalan. These would be Servalan’s private guards, a squadron of cybernetically-enhanced Mutoids.

Photo: “cimg1224” by David Gerard, taken 5th October 2004 on a Canon EX-S20. All rights reserved.