I used to have a crappy IBM Thinkpad from the early ‘90s. My Dad gave it to me. I was a real junker. I think it was a 133 MHz Pentium or something. It had 16 Megs of RAM, a 4.1G hard drive, and was pretty much good for nothing. It sat in my crawl space for years.



Also, it was years before my Dad gave to me, so who knew how old this really was? I think it had Windows 95 on it. Back in 2007, I dug it up and put “Damn Small Linux” on it with the hope that I could at least turn it into a digital photo frame. It seemed to run OK, but gave up the ghost during the mod. The hard drive suddenly died. I guess it was sitting in the crawl space for so long that the sudden activity of the hard drive was more that it could take. The hard drive had a wacky proprietary connector on it so I couldn’t just drop in a new one. I figured I’d try and run it off a floppy, or CD, but after tinkering with it for a few hours, it died for good. It just wouldn’t turn on anymore.

With that, I tossed it out. There was nothing salvageable at all. The only thing I kept was the really small laptop case that it came in.



The ThinkPad was no more than 9 or 10 inches, so the laptop case was no good for a MacBook with a 13 or 15 inch screen. I kept it anyway thinking that it would come in handy someday for something. Maybe a camera. I never thought that it would be used as a laptop case again.

I was cleaning out the crawl space today and I came across it. It’s been in there for 2 years and I totally forgot that I had it. I’ve been toting the WIND around in a regular 15” laptop case. It’s total overkill. The laptop case is heavier than the WIND.



It’s perfect! The WIND is actually smaller than that old IBM. Which leaves plenty of room for the power cord, a Mighty Mouse, headphones, and an iPhone charger.

It’s true what they say, “What’s old is new again.” Now, what to do about that yucky IBM logo?