[captainmuon]

Not the parent, but back then they had longer battery life than conventional laptops, 93% size keyboard, were really cheap (great for me as a student) and were fine for browsing the net (for about a year, then the websites became suddenly a lot more complex) and remote work.

I remember trying to buy an eeePC in a computer store and when I said it is for programming the guy there didn't want to sell me one but tried to sell me a 17" monstrosity. But I needed it for travel and to do office and coding work and most of the time I used SSH to a more powerful PC anyway.

The only stupid thing was that Microsoft artificially limited netbooks to low resolution and low RAM. You could apparently either build a netbook, or a fully-featured laptop, but not a small-format laptop without getting some kind of license penalty. Same a couple of years later when Intel and MS mandated that Ultrabooks have glossy touchscreens and motion sensors and could be maxially X mm thick.