The ThinkPad 850 was no ordinary ThinkPad. It was IBM’s high-end portable multimedia workstation, built around a 100MHz PowerPC 603e processor, with a list price of $12,399 (February 1996). The ThinkPad 850 was originally slated (see IBM announcement letter 195-176) to run four major operating systems: IBM’s own OS/2 and AIX, SunSoft’s Solaris, and Microsoft’s Windows NT.
The ThinkPad 850 and its smaller sibling 820 were initially announced in mid-1995 as models 6042 and 6040, respectively. In early 1996, they were relaunched under different model numbers, 7249 and 7247, perhaps to better fit into the RS/6000 numbering scheme. By that time, PowerPC editions of OS/2 and Solaris had been discontinued, and the entire Power Series brand was more or less dead. Not long after, Windows NT for PowerPC was gone, too. With only AIX left, IBM gave up on the idea of PowerPC ThinkPads, slightly refreshed the 850 with a faster CPU and better display, and rebranded it as RS/6000 Notebook 860.