Thanks to a very helpful reader (Mike Senior—thanks!), the OS/2 Museum can now publish the ThinkPad Power Series 850 Hardware Maintenance Service and Reference manual in the form of a PDF. This is IBM document number 30H2383. The manual might be of help to owners of antique PowerPC portables. The PDF isn’t perfect but it should be quite useful.
Anyone who needed to take apart a ThinkPad knows that although the process isn’t necessarily terribly difficult, it is complicated enough that dismantling a ThinkPad without the corresponding HMM is a perilous journey. And no one wants to break a PowerPC ThinkPad.
There’s very little else to say, just that although the HMMs for Intel-based ThinkPads have long been available in electronic format (for all ThinkPads, even ones much older than the 850), the ThinkPad 850 HMM was for some reason never available electronically, and the HMM is nowadays even harder to find than the actual ThinkPads.
I don’t have a TP850 (Indeed I’ve never had the fortune of even seeing one in the flesh) but kudos to you and Mike for putting this up on the web. Opening vintage laptops without any background of how the thing was put together is a nerve-wracking endeavor best avoided.
Hey,
Great site. Could you do some OS/2 sw review? – e.g BC++ for OS/2, WordPerfect, AmiPro, VisualAge, etc.
It’d be fun to read about those old SWs.
Good idea… compilers and word processors would probably be the obvious choice for a multi-way product comparison.
Just realised that on the side of the Thinkpad 850 there is an external ISA Bus connector….when I looked into the IBM documentation what I found was that this is :
3.1.2.13 Expansion Port
A 120-pin connector is located on the side of the system bus unit to allow an ISA Expansion Station to be attached. Through this connector, ISA-compatible signals and some additional control signals are provided
Any idea if anything ever plugged into it…
I’ve never seen anything that would plug into it, although that’s not saying much. All I know is that IBM’s Power Series machines had PCI and ISA bus.