Netbooks were all the rage in the late s. Even with underpowered hardware and limited software, the idea of an incredibly portable laptop at a super-low price was tempting to many. The ASUS Eee PC, with its adorable design and unique operating system, helped kick off a short-lived but important revolution in computing.
Apple even had a few attempts, such as the PowerBook Duo lineup and the eMate Intel developed a reference design for low-end mobile laptops in , called the Classmate PC, based on Celeron M processors. It measured You could get online with the Mbps Ethernet, Some models were also sold with a 3G datacard.
Notably, that CPU had no bit support at all. The laptop used a custom Linux distribution called Xandros, instead of the expected Microsoft Windows operating system. OpenOffice, Firefox, Skype, and other applications were already installed out of the box, and the trimmed-down operating system was advertised with a boot time of just 15 seconds. I recommend a review from The Gadgeteer if you want to learn more about the software.
You could buy a more full-featured Windows laptop for around the same price , so the value proposition was partially based on the smaller form factor and increased portability. It's ten times simpler to use than any Windows machine, starts up twice as fast no crapware! It's a little rough around the edges, but the Eee PC is a remarkably versatile machine for the price. The sudden explosion of netbooks caught Microsoft at a bad time.
The first Eee PC arrived the same year as Windows Vista: a version of Windows that was not popular and demanded better hardware than netbooks could offer. Microsoft planned for PCs to stop shipping with Windows XP by January , one year after the introduction of Vista, but the company later agreed to extend that deadline to June Microsoft had a choice to make: it could stick to its timeline for Windows Vista and allow desktop Linux to gain marketshare since it ran much better on netbooks , or it could extend the life of Windows XP for the netbook market.
