Around the end of 1993, there were not many laptops that weighed less than a book and used as much power as a nightlight. At the time, we were traveling a lot, and the thought of a lightweight laptop that lasted 5-6 hours on battery was intriguing. (IBM advertised 3 to 9 hours). Enter the IBM ThinkPad 500, which ended up being one of the most forgotten laptops of the era.

Left: IBM ThinkPad 500 (1993), Right: IBM ThinkPad 701c (1995)

This was a 486 machine running at 25/50 MHz (depending on the Caching or Double-Clocking setting), and it came with an 85 MB ($1999 configuration) or 170 MB ($2499 configuration) Hard Drive. The screen was monochrome, but it was extremely crisp – way crisper than the color version (the 510cs) which came later but used a passive-matrix screen. Our TP500 came with 4 MB of RAM; however, you could expand it to 12 by using an IC-DRAM Memory Card – the kind that looks suspiciously like a PCMCIA Card.

One particularly weird feature of the IBM ThinkPad 500 is that it came with personalized name plates (see picture of registration card below). You could send in your name to IBM, and they would give you a nameplate to affix to the laptop in a specially-recessed area.

Our ThinkPad 500 lasted all the way until its 20’th birthday – September 15, 2013 – at which point I took several pictures of it sitting next to the IBM PS/2 CL57SX, and finally retired it.

In Practice

The keyboard is wonderful to type on. Despite the August 16, 1993 edition of InfoWorld magazine claiming the laptop was too small to be usable, I have no issue touch-typing on it. It’s tactile, like the Model M Keyboard, and the TrackPoint II mouse made a lot of sense when they were engineering the machine for portability.

Pictures (Internal)

Motherboard (top, bottom, and mounted in the case)

Power board (top, bottom)

Pictures (The Original Box)

NOTE: These photos were all taken in February of 2016. While the box and manual are the original box and manual for the TP500 mentioned in this article, the rest came with one of my later ThinkPad 510 purchases.

Similar Models

Many years ago, I stumbled upon pictures of a laptop called the Lexbook SE10. It looked suspiciously similar to the ThinkPad 500, including the keyboard! Note that this is a different laptop than the Lexbook MB10, which I have written an article on.

There was also a follow-up model, called the IBM ThinkPad 510cs, which replaces the 486SLC2 of the 500 with a 486BL2 “Blue Lightning” processor. It also eschews the contrast/brightness control buttons on the screen bezel, and replaces them with soft-keys activated in combination with the Fn key.

ThinkPad 510cs (1994) – note the “IBM” logo on the 510 is in color, and only blue on the 500

ThinkPad 510cs keyboard (note the soft-key legends under Q, W, A, and S, and lack of physical buttons to control contrast/brightness on the screen bezel, unlike the 500)

Conclusion

Although the laptop went through a battery replacement and several TrackPoint nubs, purchasing it was a good financial decision. It gave 20 years of service, and continued to work in the face of several electronic meltdowns.

Revised on August 5, 2023 (added 11 pictures and Similar Models)