Bit of a random geeky unboxing

This is a Port Replicator. Kind of a massive dock thing for a number of old IBM ThinkPad laptops. My fiancee bought this for me new-in-box off eBay. This is a genuine IBM part that has sat unused in a box since 1997-ish.

Apologies for the vertical photos

These stickers at the side say "Sealed for Quality by IBM"

The manual.

This little card fell out of the manual. Some sort of update to the thing's FCC classification. This stuff just fascinates me for its historical value.

The back of the box

The unit itself, safe in a little plastic bag. This thing allows you to connect more peripherals to the laptop, such as 4 CardBus (aka 32bit PCMCIA) cards, and even midi modules and old style gameport joysticks. It also has a single USB 1.0 (yes, 1.0) port which unfortunately doesn't work unless your specific model of ThinkPad already has USB ports.

Out of the bag. The lever on the left locks any PCMCIA cards in place, but the way it does it actually blocks off part of the slots and renders most of my cards unusable, and they don't exactly move around without it, so it's basically useless. The button on the right ejects the laptop. We'll get back to that later.

The ports on the back. The big lump is the cardbus slot. To the left is monitor and sound ports, above are keyboard, mouse, joystick, parallel, serial, and external floppy drive ports. Unseen to the far left is a lonely USB port that looks like it was stuck on as an afterthought.

And here it is connected to the machine I got it for. This is a ThinkPad 380D, very much not new, Pentium MMX at a blazing fast 150MHz. Remember I mentioned the eject button earlier? You have to plug the port replicator in before you turn the computer on for the thing to work, and the minute you turn it on it makes this somewhat terrifying mechanical thunk noise. I thought I'd blown a fuse or something. Nope, it was a mechanical lock engaging that prevents you pressing the button (and thus ejecting your computer) while the dock is installed.

I primarily got this dock because without it this laptop only has support for really old 16 bit PCMCIA cards, which meant I couldn't add a modern wireless or Ethernet card, or a USB 2.0 card (the laptop lacks USB entirely). As such, this will greatly aid in transferring stuff (mostly old DOS and early Windows 9x games) onto the laptop.

This has been a little bit of a tour around an old, kind of weird, bit of new-old-stock hardware. I mostly put this up here to link to some equally geeky friends. I don't expect usersub will find it very interesting, but I'm making this public anyway because I've been known to be wrong.