disabling lock on thinkpads

I was given a couple of older thinkpads and thought I could sell them. Come to find out they are locked. Supposedly I could send them to IBM but no doubt that would cost big bucks. Any way around it, please?
Interestingly, for those of you who may not have seen this, the code that appears is 192, followed by the international symbol for "no" superimposed over "OK"->IBM. It comes up before the boot, so the BIOS is not even initialized.