Was it?
According to the article "A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995’s best-selling PC laptop." As the article says, $3,799–$5,649 was "not cheap, but not absurd at the time."
For reference the PowerBook 500 series sold "almost 600,000" units in 1994-1996 according to Wikipedia and the color screen models were $2,900-$4,840.
Moore's Law was in full effect too, everything was going obsolete as quick as time itself. Specifications values inflated in orders of 10^2 units per week, whether it was megahertz or megapixel or megabytes or grams. Making last year's new product, even with parts upgrades, was waste of time.
I would have run OS/2 Warp on it, but the internet connectivity was lacking.
I had two Xircom RealPort2 cards in mine, giving it 10MB/s Ethernet and a 56K modem.
Although primitive by today's standards, it was a solid little laptop that served me well for the tasks I was engaged in at the time … writing, Web surfing (on a very slow modem), learning HTML, and playing Doom.
It had a color screen, a big improvement over the greyscale screen I had on my previous laptop (no name Taiwanese brand that cost $2000 new!)
The 701 also easily fit in a book bag, although it was a bit thick and heavy.
There are some more photos and historical information about the 701 here:
Hopefully one day, Europe will force Apple to let users install better web browsers than Safari.
I now looked at the page with Safari, shows how good Orion is.
I might run it under edbrowse with Duktape. And it worked, but without Javascript enabled to my surprise:
https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse
Have fun learning a browser for the blind, but unvaluable for the hacker (either sighted or not).
Fast guide (you ed users already know how to use edbrowse, just glance a bit at the docs/ and you are done):
0z24 #we go to the top of the page
# and set scrollling height
z # page down
z # pagedown
/foo #term to search
g1 # if we are seeing {a link} {another one}, go to the first one.
rf #refresh the page
Guide for OpenBSD users:
https://blog.thechases.com/posts/bsd/setting-up-a-terminal-s...
Edbrowse doubles as an editor, mail client and irc one too. And gopher of course. So, yasr will do a brilliant job there.
I had that thing for years.
The keyboard mechanism is much more satisfying than I expected. Jealous of anyone who got to use one when they were new.
It was my workhorse in college and it was amazing throughout years of regular use.
WillAdams•6mo ago
_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad