Technology History | Institute of Computing Technology, Beijing — Eleven Researchers, a Gatehouse, and Later the ThinkPad

Eleven researchers, ¥200,000 of the institute's money, and a room of about twenty square metres. That is how the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Computing Technology started a company on 1 November 1984, under a name that explains exactly what it was: the Institute of Computing Technology New Technology Development Company. A state research institute was going into business. The room, as the company tells the story, was the institute's guard bungalow, the 传达室 by the gate. Liu Chuanzhi, a researcher at the institute, was the driving figure. The date is the official one, though some Chinese accounts put the business licence in mid-October. The name everyone knows came from a product. The company sold a 联想式汉卡, a card that let imported personal computers handle Chinese characters, and the associative input method it used gave the card its name. The company then took the name from the card: 联想, adopted in 1989, rendered in English as Legend. The English name changed again to Lenovo in April 2003, while the Chinese name never moved. Which sets up the part of the story worth sitting with. On 8 December 2004 this company announced it was buying IBM's personal computer division, and the deal closed on 1 May 2005 at around US$1.75 billion including assumed debt. Twenty-one years after eleven people started work in a gatehouse, they owned the ThinkPad and the business that had defined what a personal computer was. The hut is the problem for a visitor. No surviving structure or marker for it has been confirmed, so this memory is pinned at the institute itself rather than at a spot on its grounds, and the pin is campus-scale rather than a doorway. What stands here now is a tower in Zhongguancun with 中国科学院计算技术研究所 running down its face in blue characters, an ICT badge on the gate wall, and shared bicycles stacked along the pavement outside. Cover: photo by N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, geotagged at the institute. It shows the modern building, not the 1984 gatehouse, which is long gone.