Item — HN Reader

I wanted a 701C so badly back in the day but they were out of reach of my 14 year old self.

I have been debating what to do with my old T42 which I recently discovered has died, thinking I will remove the track pad and shorten the case to be just the keyboard which should make it fit a modern screen quite nicely. Will be a bit of a trick to cut the case down and keep it looking good but I am pretty sure I can manage it and this will take care of getting rid of the battery bay. Thinking of just sticking a beagle bone or two in it but I could put a dozen pi zeros in there without even trying but that would limit battery space.

2 comments

I was in an SME in the 90s where we bought 701Cs for the execs.

I can confirm they were awesome, back then it was de rigueur to have a chunky docking station to mount your hugely expensive (and altogether hugely) CRT monitor.

The 701C had a particularly nice docking station too.

If it works out please blog about it. If it doesn’t, failure is hard to admit, but learning from other’s mistakes is still valuable, so please blog about it anyway.

I have absolutely no issues with sharing my failures. Only part of the project which would be iffy is the keyboard/trackpoint, kind of hoping I can just use the GPIO on what ever board I end up with and somehow make it work but I have yet to look into it at all, seems doable for at least the keyboard. The QMK route is always possibly but it feels like the lego theory of electronics and I have a completely pointless aversion to that.