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Comment by forgotmypwd123 | Hacker News Reader

>productivity

You've obviously never tried to use a 2008 netbook for anything productive...

I used a 2008 eee PC exclusively for all personal computing needs for about two or three years (web browser, videos, music, chat and programming in python, C++ and clojure), running Arch Linux. The only thing I didn't do on it was play games and I had a desktop in the office for professional work at the time. It worked perfectly fine. Hell, I miss it sometimes.

I know plenty of people that taught themselves how to program on ZX-81's.

The problem is the difference between the aspirations and the reality. ZX81s did exactly what they were expected to do, the way they were expected to do it. Netbooks were almost universally bad. There were very few reasonable scenarios where they did what you expected them way you expected it. I have owned a Lenovo S10e for a decade now and have yet to find one of those scenarios.

Because that was the purpose of that machine. Doing the same on netbook is just painful. Which really just shows how awful these devices were

In 20160-2017, I did the final year of my CS major using nothing but an IBM Thinkpad X40 (1.1 GHz ULV Pentium 4, 1.25 GB RAM). It was quite adequate. DrRacket, CompuCell, LibreOffice, Gimp, VirtualBox, it all worked fine. Such a lovely machine...

I've also done productive work on my OLPC XO-1s (and an external keyboard, usually my IBM Model M). For example: http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo

I did absolutely learn how to zoom out on the web, so many dialog modals would have off-screen buttons with no scrolling. It's still a pet peeve of mine to this day that I test with any modals.

I also used a chromebook for a few years... tbh, I only went back to a rmbp because I needed better VPN support where I was working... Of course, I generally avoid taking it with me anywhere, I use my work laptop at work (docked) and my desktop at home.. or my phone for the most part.

I have. Besides reading on the ferry (a netbook's screen is much nicer than a phone's smaller screen), and using the Arduino IDE, with a USB-to-serial converter it was also useful for configuring networking equipment.

I really did ton of work on MSI Wind. All kinds of work, even maintaining old Delphi codebases. Granted, it had probably the best keyboard of all netbooks of that time and most time I worked with external monitor.

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