Ten ancestors of the netbook

HP Omnibook

No mention of the HP Omnibook 600C? This was a neat little machine that could run windows, and as a pointing device had a pop-out little mouse-on-a-stick thing that sprung out of the right hand side of the machine. Interesting form factor.

Yes, the Tandy (Radio Shack) M100

When it was introduced back in the day (1983 the Wikipedia article says) it was pretty advanced for its day. They were gobbled up by many a journalist simply because they had built in word processing software that allowed field journalists to write stories and (with the built in 300 baud modem) send them back to the home office.

In those days you didn't need much more than that to be a field journalist, so that is what you used. Sure you could write small basic programs, but it was the connectivity, built-ins, and portability that made it work.

Trivia: This was the last project that Bill Gates himself actually worked on.

Personal trivia: I still have one of these controlling my pool motors at my house. Amazing what you can do with a little bit of software.

Acer ZG5

Still got an ald Acer One, 120gb hard drive version. Only just been replaced by a Surface. Quite liked Ubuntu on it, currently running 13.04 happily.

I'll be so sad when my netbook dies

Samsung N140 here, nice matte screen, keyboard perfectly type-able, reasonable battery life, got it running Linux Mint for carefree web use without concern about catching anything, my perfect companion for evening use in the armchair or a little reading at night in bed to tire myself out before dozing off. Yeah, and that :)

I'm not a passive web user. I type a lot. A tablet just wouldn't cut it for me. A laptop would be annoyingly large compared to this.

When this darling Samsung dies I'll be really annoyed if I can't find something similar to replace it. I can't believe there isn't enough demand for at last a couple of manufacturers to still compete in some residual market.

Apple eMate 300

Wow what an ugly piece of crap that was.

NEC MobilePro

Having owned various flavours of Jornada (820, 680, 720, 728) and an EEE 701 all of which I liked, I still think my favourite mini-notebook type device was the NEC Mobilepro 900C - it managed the to marry the "quite small" and "usable keyboard" aspects with more success than anything else I've used.

Got 9(8) out of 10...

Don't have the second on the list, and my Psion MC is the 400, not the 200.

My Toshiba has a dud screen or driver(stripy display), but otherwise they all work.

My Eee701 runs eCs, barely.

The MC400 is a good all-day word processor.

(Nothing comes close to the battery life of a MC400 loaded with 8 x AA alkalines)

Great keyboard, too.

What about the Olivetti Quaderno PT-XT-20 ?

eh, where's the Casio Fiva?

Why doesn't that work any more?

I mean seriously, back then they could knock together devices which ran PC "operating systems" which weren't even designed to save power, but still ran for weeks on 2 AA batteries. And all of that was done with, by today's standards, trivial technology, which is far less energy efficient than anything we have today.

TEN ANCESTORS OF THE NETBOOK - Apple eMate

regarding the Apple eMate, I seem to remember reading somewhere that Apple was working closely with or funded UK inventor of the windup powered radio, Trevor Baylis, with a view to using this technology in low powered devices. Not fruitful I guess as we are yet to see such a device. Perhaps the iWatch.

Psion

I've said it before:

With all the technologically advancements since the Psion 5 & 7/netBook came out it's amazing that no one produces a product that even comes near them. Where's my keyboarded 3G enabled touch device with fully integrated apps that doesn't need to be booted or charged up every 2-3 days?

PS You've missed the Epson PX-8 from the list. A cracking 1st gen "netbook" .

Good article - and an excuse to post my PDA cabinet again

clue - at least 3 in this list are in there.

http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Gadgets/PDA-cabinet/

stu

LG Phenom

Missed out the LG phenom and the cadre of Windows CE machines!

I had a phenom in 1998/99 and amazed colleagues that I could connect to the net over IrDA to my nokia 6510 and download content at a blistering 14,400 baud (I think data was a flat £5/month unlimited at the time).

The touchscreen and built in word, excel etc were actaully pretty useful for working on short docs on the train and the outlook client was.. OK. IE was fine for basic sites.

It now lives in my son's toy box and though it doesn't switch on anymore the casing has survided many a fall down the stairs.

TRS-80 ?.

What about the old Tandy TRS-80 from 1980. I had one of these in secondary school.

http://oldcomputers.net/trs80pc1.html

A couple of years ago, at a conference, I was sitting next to a friend -- she was using her iPad2 and I my netbook. Someone walked up and asked us how the two devices compared. "There's no comparison." said my friend. I added "You're right -- I've got a real keyboard abd an SD slot." She showed me the third-party Bluetooth keyboard tucked under her tablet. I only learned later that her device cost twice as much as mine; I later spent a pittance to upgrade its hard drive to 750GB, on which I dual-boot between Win7 and Ubuntu Linux.

In 2010, I flew to San Diego for a three-week session at UCSD. I wanted to take at least two full-size laptops, but by taking only my netbook, I was able to fly comfortably with limited luggage. I was not at all certain that it would be adequate, but in fact that netbook met all of my computing needs for those three weeks, except that I had to ask a friend to copy a driver CD-ROM to a USB flash drive for me. I was surprised and impressed....

Quaderno - good for two weeks

I was at the Quaderno launch in Italy and got given one of the machines. Loved it and used it extensively until, inevitably (given that it was Italian), it broke. That was a fun two weeks. I didn't know a single journo from that launch whose Quaderno didn't break. In some cases, they found the machines broken by the time they got back from Italy. The screen had a very thin glass covering that would crack if there was a light breeze, or an 'R' in the month. Otherwise a fine attempt.

Microsoft destroyed the netbook

"I think that the problem with Netbooks is that the vociferous naysayers were exposed to the early tiny screen Linux models and found them wanting and have slagged off Netbooks ever since. If they'd tried the much better later models they'd have a different opinion. But then again, the anti-MS brigade never got over the fact that most people wanted to ditch Linux and have something that could run Windows."

What *I* didn't get over was that Microsoft destroyed the netbook. A netbook that has a faster CPU, more RAM, more hard disk sapce, and a large screen, plus cash sent straight to Microsoft, so it's like double the cost? That is not a netbook any longer, that is a low end notebook computer, which had already been on the market for years and were uninteresting despite them referring to these still as netbooks. Then, these still proved barely adequate to run WIndows 7 due to it's bloat (while they ran Linux fine.) So they put even MORE CPU power, more RAM, more hard disk space, and yet more cost. Yeah.

I'm waiting to see the actual specs on these supposed $200 Android thingies -- if I can get Android the hell off and normal Linux the hell on, these should work a treat (although I'd prefer an ARM model to an Atom one I think.)