ThinkPad’s have always had a big place in my heart

When I was around 8, my friend’s mom was working on her kitchen table. I saw she had an interesting laptop and asked her about it, she told me it was a thinkpad and then rotated the screen. I’m not sure which one she had, maybe an X220 tablet, but I couldn’t stop asking about it. And I don’t remember why, but she seemed to be enthusiastic about telling me about it and claimed that they are the best lapops and then showed me a video where they threw a Thinkpad out of an airplane and it would need to boot and open its CD drive parachute before it hit the ground.

Fast forward like 10 years I was on a greyhound bus and saw a passenger next to me pull out a really old thinkpad, maybe even the one I will be talking about today. I remember he had a 4x3 display, it might have been an X60 or x61, I don’t exactly recall but he might have been doing some producivity work so it may have been the modded version.

When I arrived at my destination I started looking into the ThinkPads, browsing the subreddit, and browsing Ebay. Soon enough I came upon a listing of of a X220 for a good price and ordered it.

At the time I was using my M1 MacBook for almost everything, but I found that I would code better on the Thinkpad, not because it was “better” but because I enjoyed the experience far more. Using it was a pleasure.

Fast forward a few more years, I have gotten “over” my ThinkPad phase, and all my ThinkPads but one are stored in a Garage in a different city. But the itch is coming back, as I have been getting more busy with professional activities I yern for geeking out about some old tech all the meanwhile trying new things.

I had recently moved all my workflows to Arch (btw) and really enjoyed the experience and outcomes. While watching Mental Outlaw I kept seeing “BSD” and while I had some surface level knowledge I wanted to learn more.

I started off by installing FreeBSD on the one ThinkPad I had T420, you can read that article here.

And for some reason I wanted a X60, and considering a found one for a great deal I ordered it.

Something I didn’t realize would be such an issue was that the system I ordered was 32bit.

• Program incompatablility
• Browser incompatablities, had trouble finding anyone that worked