Big Blue's Butterfly

摘要

Consumers wanted the impossi-ble: a long, rectangular keyboard that would fit into the small square case of an ultraportable computer. As a mechanical engineer with IBM, John Karidis had pondered the problem for months. Then, sitting at his desk one day, Karidis began to daydream of his 3-year-old, Amy, building shapes out of her toy blocks. Suddenly he realized that the board could be broken into two distinct, movable parts. He rushed down the hall with his own ThinkPad 700, pressed its keyboard against the glass of the copier and made a hundred duplicates. He then sat down on the floor of his office and began cutting them apart. By dinnertime, he had a paper prototype to show his wife. By spring of this year, IBM had the ThinkPad 701C, a product that may set a new standard for useability among lightweight computers.