![]() ![]() (The slightly later Alchemy MIPS architecture will be the subject of a future entry when we talk more about portable SunRays.) That doesn't mean there weren't attempts, of course, and probably the first was the R4200. Various later Chinese rejiggerings under the Loongson/Godson names are better known to modern audiences, and Richard Stallman famously used such a laptop, but comparatively few portable MIPS platforms existed back in the day the famous SGI Indy laptops in Congo and Twister were actually Silicon Graphics-built mockups with an offscreen Indy controlling an Indy Presenter as the display. Of the major RISC architectures, though, classic MIPS (as opposed to the modern undead zombie MIPS uncomfortably market-sandwiched between ARM and RISC-V) had relatively poor penetration in the portable and low-power market. I also have an "800" Type 6020 that opened its SCSI controller fuse after a mishap with a defective SCSI2SD. That's my own 860 in the Wikipedia picture running AIX 4 with an off-the-shelf NTSC camera connected to the onboard video capture port, taken by an attendee at the Vintage Computer Festival pre-COVID. ![]() IBM themselves made a line of PowerPC ThinkPads that were actually branded as ThinkPads (they officially ran AIX, Solaris and Windows NT, and there was briefly a really rough OS/2 port), although they did the same thing with the top-of-the-line 860 as they did with the WorkPad, which was sold as and by the RS/6000 division as "not a ThinkPad" even though it's basically a ThinkPad. In fact, the z50 isn't the first RISC ThinkPad or even ThinkPad-adjacent device. ![]() However, there were a fair number of SPARC laptops primarily from Tadpole-RDI but also some smaller companies, and even a handful of PA-RISC laptops (and if you happen to have an ALPHAbook you're not using, I'm willing to deal - seriously). Obviously the biggest absolute number of these are Apple devices, because PowerBooks came in 68K and PowerPC flavours (along with iBooks), and Mac laptops are now ARM, I mean, Apple silicon. I should say as further preamble that one of my collector hobbies is picking up non-x86 laptops. Say hello to the RISC ThinkPad that's not a ThinkPad, the IBM WorkPad z50. ![]()
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