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The IBM ThinkPad 730 |
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Last updated: August 2023 |
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The ThinkPad 730 is an A4-sized 486 tablet PC. You can write on the monochrome screen using a special pen and appropriate software. No other keyboard or pointing device is included as standard!
Lots of ThinkPad 730s have been coming on to the second-hand market recently. I recently bought one as an addition to my ThinkPad collection, since I didn't have one of the tablet models.
This page is a work-in-progress recording my attempts to get the system running as I like it. The ThinkPad 730 shares one important peculiarity with my favourite IBM portable, the PC110 palmtop, in that it uses PCMCIA hard drives. Some of the pointers here refer to documents on my PC110 site where the principles are common to both models.
Want a more detailed description of the 730T
and 730TE models?
This website is a little bit of history, maintained largely as it was when I
created it, being both a technical reference and a museum
piece of how websites used to look and feel. In truth I sold my TP730 in
about 2002, so unless I can find one again, the unfinished pages will
remain... unfinished.
I have restored the site as it was in November
1999, but have been working through sympathetically updating where
needed. The original pages were created and maintained in Netscape Composer (as found in the v4.x Netscape Communicator suite) hand-tweaking the HTML where necessary, so I am updating them using its successor, SeaMonkey Composer.
No CSS, no CMS, no Wordpress, no Javascript... just HTML, GIFs and
JPGs. Oh, and HTML tables to control layout, just as we did back
then! For more historical horror, the original site was hosted on a
Windows Server with Frontpage 3.0 Server Extensions, adding things like
forms and a page counter; the fingerprints are still here in the HTML
code, although I've purged all the useless _vti_cnf folders.
Most of the work has been in updating links to file downloads and to
other sites of interest - almost all of the original websites and FTP servers
are now long gone. Where you see 
against a link, it will take you to an archived copy of the site, thanks to the Internet Archive.
Do please consider donating to the Internet Archive, as it is a
fantastic resource for retro computing. I give a little every month.
| Windows 95 Information on finding and configuring Pen Services 2.0 to provide pen support for Windows 95. Since I have the docking cradle that stands the machine in portrait orientation, I have been trying to sort out drivers, etc., that will support this - currently, I have the display rotated through 90 degrees, plus a new pen driver definition to flip the digitiser round 90 degrees also. I also have PCMCIA support working. |
 portrait mode |
| Windows 3.1 Information on finding and configuring Pen Services 1.0 to turn ordinary Windows 3.1 into the rather grand sounding Windows for Pen Computing! Again, I looked for ways of getting portrait mode working, and it turned out to be much easier than for Windows 95. |
portrait mode |
Easy-Setup - Device setup, boot order, and power management configuration.
General pen usage
Pen Services for Windows usage
Click here for software, drivers, other web pages, and the ThinkPad mailing list.
If you've got any questions regarding the information on these pages, or if you have any further information on a ThinkPad 730 subject, drop me a note.
This page has been visited [hit counter] times since November 5th, 1999.