(note this is a guest post from Tenox)
So after around 15 years of searching and going through 3 or 4 dead units I finally laid my hands on a working system! For those who don’t know, ThinkPad 850 is not an ordinary laptop because it rocks PowerPC!
It means that apart from AIX, I will be able to run such cool operating systems like OS/2 PowerPC, Solaris PPC or Windows NT PPC.
The system is quite banged up, the keyboard has broken keys and the built-in cdrom doesn’t seem to work. The battery is of course dead. But the base system works just fine. Here is a screenshot of a top secret firmware prompt:
Sweet!
it will be sweet when I get the cdrom and floppy drive…
Ahh, soo lucky! I’m searching for one too! 🙂
If you have spare $10.000 then you can buy one here: http://www.portableunix.com/
I have Visual C++ 4.0 and a few other small programs for Windows NT 4.0 ppc Downloaded if your interested. Also “Dependency Walker 2.2” has a Windows PPC version. http://www.dependencywalker.com/
So Does the Programmer’s File Editor…
http://www.z80.info/uepte.htm
There was too a program called “Wx86.exe” that was able to run x86 win32 on WinPPC, but it does not seem to be available anywhere.
Wx86 for NT/PPC is mythic as the VMware Tools for OS/2 and the Phoenix Corebuilder for NoteBIOS (corebuilderp.exe) tools.
I have the VIsual C++ in a fact we bought it together with Jason and it was covered on the blog earlier. I used it to compile aclock and ttg for WinPPC but not on my own system.
I have got a replacement cdrom and it works, but won’t read my freshly burned CDs. Some old ones, no problem. But not the new ones. I guess I will need to do some shopping for older type writeable cds.
Some info about this exact model, with some nice screenshots.
http://mcbx.netne.net/computers/portables/tp850/index.htm
This is an awesome link. I have not seen it before! Thanks a lot!
Does it have Open Firmware? As far as I googled it doesn’t have it built in, but since it can boot Solaris, it must have it somewhere on an external media (floppy?). Have you played with AIX or Solaris on it?
No it doesn’t have OF and actually OF is not required to boot Solaris. On a x86 PC Solaris works without it and so it does on PPC. FYI this particular specimen has been acquired by OS/2 Museum and is featured in following article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2033