One of my earliest laptops is this IBM ThinkPad 755Cs dating back to 1994. According to the website ThinkWiki this model came with a colour display, either a 486 DX2 50 or DX4 75 Mhz processor, 4 MB RAM, 1 MB Western Digital WD90C24 video, Cirrus Logic CS4248 for audio, and a choice of a 170, 340, or 540 MB hard disk drive.
This particular one was maxed out with the DX4 processor and 540 MB drive, so it fetched some decent coin when new. It had also been upgraded to 20 MB RAM at some point.
For trialling out pcAnywhere32 with the parallel port cable, with me are two ThinkPads for the exercise. The one on the left is a Pentium II 380Z running Windows NT 4.0, and beside it is a Pentium 380D running Windows 98 SE.
ThinkPad 380Z on the left, ThinkPad 380D to the right.
For this I’ll be using the 380Z as the host, while the 380D will be the remote. Well so I thought…
eBay Purchase Price: $25 AUD
Country of Origin: Australia
Condition: Very Good
Just recently I picked up a complete copy of pcAnywhere32 7.5 remote access software. The good news is the manuals are in excellent condition, and the original parallel port cable is included which can often go missing. The bad news is that out of the four floppy disks for the software itself, the second disk couldn’t be imaged due to bad sectors. Fortunately I could retrieve this elsewhere.
Symantec’s strategy in the late 1980s and early 1990s had been one of company acquisitions. One such acquisition was announced in August 1990 with the purchase of Peter Norton Computing Inc. who had a stronghold in the DOS disk utilities space. Symantec retained the Norton branding and had done so for a number of years.
OS/2 initially developed in cooperation between Microsoft and IBM back in the 1980s had a turbulent history over the years. By 1996 with the final retail release of OS/2 Warp 4.0, IBM conceded defeat by Microsoft realising it was not able to compete with Windows 95, although still managed to withhold a portion of the enterprise market. Years later it was still found on some servers and even ATMs on the street.
OS/2 Warp 4.52 was the final version by IBM released in 2001 with official support ending in 2006. It wasn’t offered in a retail package, but for those who had a contractual agreement with IBM for OS/2 support. After this the foundation of the OS had evolved into what is now known as eComStation.
