Everyone Thinks This is the First Netbook: ASUS Eee PC 701

The Eee PC 700 series was released in late 2007 and was the first affordable small form factor consumer laptop. Today many would call this the first netbook. However, palm tops, PDA's, and other small laptops had existed well before the conception of the Eee PC. Today we are going to look at the progression of the netbook and where the Eee PC fits into the evolution of affordable computing.

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[AAComputersandTechnology]

Oh man, I forgot to edit in the Patreon clip for this month! Patrons are as follows:


$10 Supporters:
Matthew Lowery



$5 Supporters:
Spencer Nick

Will Voss
Anton Hakansson


$2 Supporters:
Jonathan Domenech

[BobPony]

Is it me or does that Linux distro on that Eee PC use the Windows XP Luna Silver theme? 🤔

[CW-lewc]

FYI, Psion is not pronounced “shin”. It’s pronounced “sigh-on”

[miralemnermina]

My dad had one of those, I learned how to use Linux and later I installed Windows on it. Idk that it sucked, it still has a warm place in my heart

[Ray-ujcm]

I still use mine today! As it's so tiny (literally the touchpad is two thumb widths), it's great for quick, portable remote desktop/server tasks

[lennybustratt]

I bought an Asus eepc 900 just because I love the size, perfect to have if you want to write some documents on the go. Also, I loved the math games as a tween so I was happy to find those as well. Wish I could have internet on it for searching though.

[killerpimp]

I had the Eee PC 900 with the larger screen and Win XP. I was kind of tricked into buying it, when I saw it in the Target ad, it looked like a full size laptop. But when I got to the store, it was way smaller then I expected. I got it anyway, and people were always interested in such a small laptop running windows. I guess they even had some that even came with Vista. I used it for a couple of years to run DJ mixing software, and it worked fine until I spilled a beer on it one night. It would still boot, but some keys were permanently stuck down, so it was useless.

[snafuu]

IIRC the missing RAM Door is specific to the Surf Models as these have soldered on RAM (512MB) whereas the 4G Model had a DIMM Slot (which did work with up to two Gigabytes of Memory).
BTW: The mentioned 900MHz Processor was in fact clocked down to 630MHz by default - You could overclock it by rising the FSB Clock



I still remember when these were announced. There were only the 4G ones sold here in Germany and there was quite a hype about these and they were sold out in a lot of places pretty quickly. I even drove about 50km to pick mine up from a store which still had some in stock (I got a white one as the black ones were sold out even quicker).


For me this was the only way I could afford a small and portable notebook (I was still in school and the other common small ones like the sony vaios were a lot more expensive). It was like a low end subnotebook and I carried this one around pretty much everywhere for a few years.


Mine was used for internet stuff (browsing, twitter and IM Clients), some light gaming (it ran Unreal Tournament, 1503 a.d. and Simcity 4 fine) and stuff like picture editing (I even ran early versions of Lightroom on that) and media playback (480p DivX/Xvid, it can't handle H.264). A friend of mine even used his one as a MP3 Player (It did fit in a jacket pocket).


I replaced it with one of the later Netbooks primarily because of the tiny amount of built in storage (the 4GB "SSD" which was more like a soldered on CF Card got pretty cramped after a while - especially using windows) and used it as a linux server for a few years afterwards (running Samba Shares and a Minecraft Server)


About the comparision with the PDAs of that time - I think this kind of device isn't really comparable. I had an hp iPAQ and an htc prophet at this time as well but I used these for quite different things (looking up quick stuff online, music playback and gps navigation / geocaching). I even used the PocketPC Phone thing as a GPRS modem to get my eeePC online (via one of those tiny bluetooth sticks - It didn't have bluetooth builtin)

[jessragan]

A nice bit of nostalgia. I quickly hopped on board the netbook train when the EEE 701 was announced, because I've always liked small (and cheap) computers. At the time it was good enough, but twelve years later, I can't imagine ever going back. Everything's a little TOO small, especially the monitor which is bracketed by speakers and has a tiny resolution. If the Thinkpad I'm using now is a Cadillac, the EEE 701 is more like that car Steve Urkel drove in Family Matters.

[arjnoro]

Man I just have to say, I love my 701 surf. I added an internal sd hub and have 4 memory modules. It rocks, its so fast, I even have autocad on it. Later I found another 701 with the access ram door and everything. I run xp on it and it flies. Its great for college. Im a professor and it serves me well. There is a need for these type of computers.

[another]

Psion is pronounced "sigh on", not "shin". It was a British company with a long history of creating innovative handheld machines and the amazing 'EPOC' OS that eventually became 'Symbian', for many years the most popular mobile OS on the planet. It's Netbook model was around years before ASUS 'borrowed' the name, and was a drop dead gorgeous piece of kit for the time.

[jerryakamuadams]

i have fond memories of this laptop. it was my first laptop as a teenager, my first exposure to Linux, but i was so used to windows so, i figured out how to install windows xp on it despite its tiny 1gb SSD lol. i used it for a number of years thereafter.

[RandomGreymane]

I have one of these reloaded with Debian and it’s quite happily running as an Airtime server with an external drive.

[thelongslowgoodbye]

I used to own one of these in the 4G model and it had an accessible RAM door. It took me about a month or two to get used to the tiny keys on the keyboard. By about 6 months, I was typing faster on it than a regular keyboard. I remember using Xandros on it first, then I installed Windows XP which I used for a while. Then I put a modded version of Vista on it. Later on when I had changed machines, I used it as a hobby laptop putting other things on it like Android X86 before getting rid of it. I found the 4GB SSD to be much too constraining for me to keep it for longer. If it had a 16GB SSD or bigger, I probably would have kept it.

[tobyradloff]

Asus did make a good little netbook with the EEE series. I have an Asus EEE 901 that I bought new in 2008. When I first bought it, I had problems with it crashing when it tried to download updates. The computer came with only 4GB of storage and the downloads took almost 10 GB. I upgraded it by purchasing a 64 GB SSD for it, and re-downloaded the original Xandros Linux it came with. The downloads, after upgrading, came through OK. I later upgraded it to Easy Peasy Ubuntu Linux, which worked fine for a few years. I recently converted it to Chromium OS, giving me more usefulness out of it.

[SubterraneanXiu]

Have this on in the box still. I forget which Linux distro I have installed on it.

[garyclouse]

I had a 2 g surf model. several apps, such as sjype were actually installed but disabled by default On the early units it was possible to enable some of the disabled apps by edition some text configuration files.

[ScottBilik]

Perhaps consider doing a follow-up video where you boot something small like Puppy Linux via a USB Flash Drive to see how it handles a more up to date, but still light OS.

[krazykat]

Had a 1000 series Eee PC that I ran Crunchbang Linux on for a few years as my on the go beater laptop. Served me well for what it was.

[valley_robot]

I loved my 701 it ran fruity loops, little portable studio on the bus