My wife and I met while working on these! We were fixing defects (wrong/missing components, bad ICs etc.) on the populated motherboards of these (and other) Thinkpads. We had internal nicknames for the different models; can’t remember which one was which but, given the timeline, this one was in production the year that we became permanent hires (& then I left to go work in IT the following year).
When I left IBM, I think they had just incorporated then-new Pentium processors into the laptops, and for some reason the capability wasn’t even fully utilized - the explanation didn’t make sense and at this far remove I don’t remember much else.
My wife stayed on and then another company took over the manufacturing operation in Austin – then that company moved a couple miles north, where Texas Instruments used to build stuff (and then they finally closed that, too). The former IBM site is now a rather tony shopping center.
