Sitting on the desk next to me is an honest-to-gosh A31 of 2002. This model of ThinkPad was one of the most famous and often considered to be the pinnacle of IBM's mobile workstation development. In many ways, it wouldn't be equaled until the short-lived W7xx from a few years ago and now out of production. This model would culminate two years later in 2004 with the A31p of the NASA Space Shuttle and International Space Station fame. They were pretty much as high of performance machine that a buyer could get while still using actual mobile computing parts. Of course, there were a number of machines at that time sold through secondary market channels which used desktop parts, but if you wanted an actual machine which could travel regularly, this was it!
To start with, these machines were true "3 spindle" computers, meaning that it had the capacity to hold a hard disk drive, an optical drive, as well as a floppy. This was a form-factor that was becoming increasing rare by the first part of the new millennium, but not only did the A31 have it, the two non-HDD drive bays were swappable modular bays, capable of taking a bewildering number of devices which ranged from floppy (1.44Mb FDD, 120Mb Superdisk), optical (CD, CDRW, DVD, DVD/CDRW, DVD+RW), as well as a number of specialty items designed for the series. These included, hard drive adapter, battery, Palm Pilot sync cradle, and slide-out numeric keypad! On top of that, some models included a special USB port on top of the screen to take a webcam. Screen resolutions ran from the typical 1024 x 768 on either 14.1" or 15.1" panels, all the way up to an eye-straining 1600 x 1200.....which by the way is the same resolution as the 20" panel of my ThinkVision L200p desktop display! CPUs were mobile P4s ranging from 1.7 to 2.0Ghz, although they'll take up to the blistering (literally) 2.6Ghz chip. Although, the factory specs only listed the max RAM as 1Gb, they would take the later 1Gb modules to run a full 2Gb. The hard disk drive size was only limited to whatever you can find in size of parallel drive to purchase. For the 2002-04 era, these are almost ridiculous specs.....and that was only on the inside....
As with all professional level ThinkPads since their inception, there were expansion docks as well as simple port replicators available. The most sophisticated was the 2631, that not only included yet another, swappable modular bay, BUT the ability to add 2 PCI cards, as well as more PCMCIA slots! Configuration was limited pretty much only by the imagination of the user.
For NASA and the International Space Station which adopted and used them for many years, this included a wide variety of applications including docking, control of external apparatus, as well as more mundane task such as recording experimental data.
Which gets me back to my very own little mission control here in North Texas. This particular machine had been one of my brother's old computers and came to replace my wife's aging A30 (same chassis, but PIII gen). She used it for a couple of years and it went on to become my son's to replace his first computer, an A21p. Eventually, it went on to Amarillo to a relative, where it has spent the last two years, until finally returning home this summer due to a failed CCFL. Most people might think that it's a little crazy to take a 10 year old computer and spend $30 on it to replace a screen to get it back running again, but as you can see by it's history; the A31 is kind of a special machine!
