The sorrowful Demise of IBM’s Awesome Fold Out Keyboard [Video]

Sometimes even essentially the most thoughtful designs and engineering feats are preordained to fail. Such is the case with IBM’s Butterfly Keyboard (aka the TrackWrite), an ingenious approach to what turned out to be a brief problem.

The year is 1995. Terms like ” ultraportable” and ” small footprint” have become a hard and fast component to compu-jargon, and computer makers are doing their best to shrink down their laptops for the traveling business set (the sole people really occupied with these ultraportables at this point). The difficulty with these tiny lappies? Aspect ratios (4:3) and screen sizes (~10.5-inches) mandated some supremely uncomfortable compromises in keyboard size. That’s until IBM designer John Karidis came up with a chic solution for the ThinkPad 701c . Karidis discovered how to stuff an entire-sized keyboard (11.5-inches) into a 9.7-inch laptop by dividing the keyboard into two interlocking pieces that folded inside and outside as you opened and closed the laptop’s lid. Because the movement was driven by a cam on the lid’s hinge, the keyboard’s movement was always fluid and in line with the motion of the lid. As a matter of fact, this transforming keyboard was so artful and unique, it’s now on display at MoMa .

Unfortunately, while the butterfly helped make the 701 the head-selling laptop of 1995, neither the keyboard or the laptop series had much of a shopper self life after that. As screen sizes and aspect ratios grew, the will for one of these keyboard quickly became redundant. Thankfully, obsolescence didn’t occur before Paul Reiser could make an ad for the 701.

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Image courtesy of Thinkpads.com

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This post is tagged: computer makers, engineering feats, laptop series, matter of fact, sized keyboard, thoughtful designs, ultraportables