Peter Hortensius, President of the Product Group at Lenovo and an IBM researcher in 1992, says the 700c was so exciting because it finally did what users wanted. "It really nailed something ThinkPad has always tried to do, which is really solve user problems. A screen I can read on, a keyboard I can type on, a pointing device like the TrackPoint... it was one of the first credible computers of that size, and it drove a lot of excitement early on." Sales, market share, and IBM stock soared.

Thanks to the critical and commercial success of the 700c, ThinkPad became a powerful name almost immediately. And the hits kept coming: in 1994, the ThinkPad 755CD was the first laptop to have a CD-ROM drive built in. The next year, IBM released the 701c, which featured a "butterfly" keyboard that expanded to be wider than the laptop itself — the butterfly idea didn’t stick, but the 701c was so impressive that it’s now on display in the Museum of Modern Art. 1997 brought the first DVD-ROM inside a laptop, with ThinkPad 770. ThinkPad laptops have been the first to have integrated fingerprint readers, and the first with built-in wireless. ThinkPads were even one of the first laptops in space, along with the GRiD Compass.

Each new model, said Hortensius, got people riled up anew. "I still remember when they launched [the 700c] — and I wasn't a part of that team, I was sitting on the research side — and we were just amazed. 'What do you mean, they're selling this thing above list?' You know, people just HAD to get the thing, and were willing to pay whatever it took to get it. And it had that for the first few generations."

Of course, not all of the company's firsts were quite so significant. The very first ThinkPad was the pen-based 700t, a Newton-esque tablet / laptop hybrid intended for vertical markets like insurance companies, which didn't catch on and didn't stay on the market very long. In 2009, Lenovo released the ThinkPad W700s, which had a second screen that popped out of the right side of the device — that didn't exactly take the world by storm either. But even in the face of its flops, the team stays committed to trying new things. "We've taken some bold risks," Lenovo's VP of ThinkPad Dilip Bhatia said, "and they don't all pay off... and that's okay."

Even while it tried to be first, fastest, best and most beautiful, however, each new IBM computer was foremost a ThinkPad.