Just making an observation

I am taking apart an old dell notebook. A pentium 266 or something along those lines, but what amazed me was, that the notebook had a heatpipe. Exactly when did heatpipes come out? I thought this to be strange, but cool.

i have taken quite a few notebooks apart too and and all i have seen are heat pipes. Some notebooks i have seen though have had little fans for cooling the northbridge.

My old HP notebook had one (found out when I dropped it and split the case). Still got damn hot, tho

Heatpipes have been used for decades, since about the beginning of the space program. They just hadn't figured out easy manufacturing methods until recently.

The way they work is that a liquid with a high latent heat of vaporization, such as water, ammonia, or alchol, is placed under a vacuum so that it boils at lower temperatures. The heat from the processor causes it to boil, carrying a lot of heat with it. When it reaches the cooler end of the tube, it condenses, and it is wicked back to the hot end. They can carry a tremendous amount of heat, but they can't go any colder than the boiling point of the liquid under the vacuum in the tube. (Note: Water boils at a much lower tempreature if the pressure is lower.