For the original German article, click here.



When we talk about the age of a dog, we often use dog's years to compare its age with that of a human. The same is the case for technology: One dog year goes a lot faster than one human year. Three years of technological development can mean enormous changes while a human only changes minimally within the same three years.



25 years, however, is almost an eternity, both for technology and for humans. 25 years are a quarter of a century and more than a quarter of an average human lifetime. 25 years ago, the cold war had only just been put behind us and Bill Clinton was about to be elected president.



In short, 1992 is quite a while back. The world of technology looked very different; the PC revolution was in full swing and hardly any of the brands that existed then still exist today - they have been swallowed up by the constant technological revolutions and market upheavals. Some of the companies that did manage to keep going - and quite successfully, in fact, are the large industrial institutions such as Microsoft or Apple; Windows still exists, too, although it looked completely different then. But there are not that many computer brands that have managed to survive: one example would be the brand "TravelMate", which now belongs to Acer and was first developed by Texas Instruments.



But TravelMate never reached the prominent position that another brand, that also existed in 1992, did: the ThinkPad. The ThinkPad brand has overcome crises and changes of direction in the PC market and has nonetheless managed to stay true to itself (for the most part). We would like to take the brand's 25th birthday as an occasion to take a closer look at how it all happened and why the ThinkPad developed a cult status.

