You May Be Able to Get There From Here

Hyper-textual Readings and Writing about Books and Internet Culture. Authored by Steve Pepple

Feb 25, 2009

History of the Netbook

As a proud user of the eeePc (running Ubuntu 8.10, with a lean eeePc kernel), I enjoyed this chronicle of netbooks since the early nineties.

Category: Readings

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One Response

  1. Andy Welfle says:
    February 25, 2009 at 4:33 am

    Great article! I’ve been curious about the Eees myself. Maybe I can play with yours at some point…

    I did notice that it completely left out the Apple Newton eMate 300. I had one of these, around 1997 or 1998. It was a great machine. Good only for word processing, spreadsheets and some really light emailing (if you have the right plugin card), it was basically a Newton MessagePad 2100 put in a laptop case with a keyboard attached. One of the best things about it was the impressive 12 hour battery life (shorter if you use the backlight). I took this thing to the Philippines for two weeks with me to keep a travelogue, and it excelled.

    One of the hacks I found for it allowed me to transfer files to my Rev. B iMac via the Infrared port.

    Ahh, how I wish I had an eMate again. Alas, mine died of a blown-up power supply, and fixing it wouldn’t have worked. The AlphaSmarts look kinda like it, but without the folding out.

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