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My first ever computer was a laptop with a first gen Atom and 1GB of RAM. Single-core, no hyperthreading. I was super excited and loved it, but it was so slow that it felt unusable even to me as a young teenager that didn't know any better.

Guess I should be thankful though, in trying to get it to be faster I discovered that some Linux distros can be very lightweight, and it started me down a rabbit hole I'm still going down.

That's the same computer I learned to program with. I was forced to use vim because of system resources. And now I'm glad.

It's funny how many of us have the same story.

It was a bit like the microcomputers in that respect.

TinyXP ran very well on this class of computers, especially for as long as Firefox supported XP, it was a really useful platform.

Sort of like a chromebook before chromebook.

I later did a lot of C, PHP and Python programming in Linux + Emacs on such a computer, so not completely useless.

A more useful hack is unlocking AES-NI with the same method. Some laptops have AES instructions permanently disabled on boot via BIOS by the OEM to comply with regional cryptography regulations, such as some Lenovo Thinkpad models in Russia. In the 2010s, disassembling the BIOS and patching a single line away can regain hardware AES functionality. Unfortunately it's no longer possible after Boot Guard's BIOS lockdown.

Reference for that last sentence?

With Intel Boot Guard (now almost pre-enabled on all laptops on the market), the CPU verifies the digital signature of BIOS code. The public key is burned into the chip [0] by the OEM before it leaves the factory. If signature verification fails, the CPU refuses to execute any code. Naturally, any code modification in the BIOS causes the check to fail and effectively bricking the BIOS.

[0] Actually the PCH, aka southbridge, not the CPU. But it's not much of a difference for end users.

See:

* Intel Boot Guard, Coreboot and user freedom

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33981.html

* Why You Don't See Coreboot Supported By Many Modern Intel Systems

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Boot-Guard-Kills-Coreboo...

* Bootguard (for a technical description)

https://trmm.net/Bootguard/

> it was slow and under-powered

As someone who used one of these laptops as a daily driver for years, I disagree. The CPU was quite powerful. I would regularly use it to take notes in class, do development work (with an IDE) & browse the web. Compilation of larger components could be quite slow.

If you didn't insist on running the latest desktop environment with a bazillion bizarre graphical effects, it worked without issue. Battery life was 'good enough' that I could get a couple hours of regular usage.

Fast forward to today & many "productivity" applications like Microsoft Teams are so bloated they consume more memory than the entirety of that system had.

Same; I had an EeePC as my main laptop for four years. Never really felt slow, aside from when compiling software (I distinctly remember installing MacPorts on my hackintosh partition and it taking three hours to compile the base set of packages).

>As someone who used one of these laptops as a daily driver for years, I disagree. The CPU was quite powerful.

The benchmarks, reviews and poor sales disagreed with you. Maybe it wasn't under-powered for your standards and needs back then, but compared to what the mainstream laptop market of the time, they were very slow in windows apps which is what most consumers ran back then.

Past Windows XP I've never used a Windows system on any hardware I would consider adequate. Other than the non-stop "windows update broke thing X which worked just fine" it has a user interface that still manages to feel behind Windows 3.11.

I think the fact that I consider XP to be performant is the fact that I had less to compare against back when it first released.

> reduce die-size and save cost.

reducing power consumption was also a goal, which this worked for too. Though the early models at least were paired with hungry chipsets that negated most of that benefit.

Being battery efficient is irrelevant if it comes at the cost of drastic reductions in performance that make the device unusable. The sales numbers reflected this consumer choice in that era.

I seem to remember netbooks (even with the power sucking chipsets the early ones had) being pretty popular for short awhile. Ultimately they were kind of a flash in the pan, but Microsoft was sufficiently afraid of them they brought XP back from the dead just so they could get linux off the things. (Vista/7 are way to big of resource hogs to run tolerably on these, although they did have some starter edition of windows7 for the better performing later models)

The sales numbers for these devices were very good for at least a couple of years. They ran the current Windows (Vista) at the time very badly, partly due to the CPU but mainly due to not having much RAM, so MS extended the life of XP for them as it was scared Linux would win more mindshare otherwise. Linux and OpenOffice (IIRC this was before the OpenOffice/LibreOffice thing) perfectly well. Web browsing was OK too as long as you didn't overdo the number of tabs open (things were mostly not as bloated as they are today in that area, by quite a margin), and of course tasks like email were fine.

My little netbook running Debian was a bargain and did sterling work for a while, and I know others that found that form factor and other properties to be rather convenient.

Sales numbers did fall off precipitously eventually, partly due to new models being hobbled by restrictions from MS (they wouldn't sell them XP for higher spec models IIRC, so no models got much of a RAM upgrade, and as that became an issue market share was lost to tablets (and to a small extent smarter phones) and higher spec laptops).

>The sales numbers for these devices were very good for at least a couple of years

Sales number were good at first because all consumers were drawn to the massively small price tags of these machines along with the small form factor/increased portability. They were like 50% cheaper than a regular laptop and could fit in your purse/cargo pants. Who wouldn't want that?! Especially in developing countries like Eastern Europe where a regular laptop would cost several months(plural!) wages.

> Sales numbers did fall off precipitously eventually

Yes, because after purchasing them, consumers wised up and realized the low price tags came with some huge compromises the Average Joe did not expect (Atom CPU was too slow for Windows which let's face it was by far the most used OS back then, low-res display, minuscule eMMC storage that filled up far too quickly, the Linux ones didn't ship with a sane mainstream distro like Ubuntu or Mint but with some weird bare-bones custom one that had no mainstream apps available, playing PC games was an absolute no-go, etc.) so the Netbook market crashed, as unless you absolutely needed the small form factor and willing to put up with these compromises, you were much better off buying a second hand used regular laptop at the price of a new Netbook.

In a way, these slow, small-storage, weird-Linux, Atom Netbooks kinda poisoned the well for the rest of the market segment, even for the "good Netbooks" whcih were more capable, until Apple came with the Air and the PC market brought the Ultrabooks.

The only place I saw Netbooks flourish was, no joke, the taxi drivers in my Eastern European country, which, due to their diminutive size, would attach them to the central console of their ancient cars as some DIY infotainment system, and use them to watch movies and play games while waiting for customers (not gonna lie, a 2010 Netbook with keyboard bolted to the central console is still a better infotainment system than the touchscreen ones shipping in most modern cars today). I even saw one taxi driver playing DOTA on a Netbook in his car (not while driving, although for Eastern Europe that wouldn't be out of the picture).

Its micro-architecture was completely different and far more simpler and lower performing than Intel's Pentium or Core chips of the time in order to massively reduce die-size and save cost.

...and yet they decided to add VT-x for some reason, but disable it?

It's called market segmentation. It has been happening for decades.

You can also buy cars with included heated seats and they're disabled unless you pay extra.

Atom cores were getting pitched a lot for micro servers at the time. At the time containerizing tech hadn't really taken off; Vagrant using full VMs was still bleeding edge env orchestration.

The first generation Atoms were some of the worst chips ever made. By the end with the Bay Trail and Cherry Trail chips they were quite good, but Intel killed them in favor of M-series chips with the same performance per watt but five times the price tag.

Bayfail was utterly broken on Linux until two years ago or so. There is a bugzilla entry with more than 1000 replies. And it appears that some platforms with that CPU still have issues with Linux, which according to that issue is yet another bug.

The biggest problems I had with Bay/Cherry is because they are 64bit processors but have 32bit UEFI. So the distro has to be able to install a 64bit version but from a 32bit UEFI. Most of the "mini PC" that came with those Atoms came with a 32bit Windows preinstalled, I assume for the same reason. Some distributions like AntiX, MX Linux, and Void Linux, can boot 64bit OS from 32bit UEFI.

Also WiFi/Bluetooth can be problematic when they are on SDIO, in my personal experience. Which anecdotally for me was about 50% of the time.

That might be why some manufacturers decided to disable 64-bit support on them, which as it turns out, is another MSR you can do a BIOS mod to unlock.

What does its compatibility with Linux have to do with how good it was as a chip?

Strictly technically speaking, not much, however having working Linux Open Source drivers extends the life of the product using it well beyond the point Microsoft, and/or the hardware manufacturers, declare it obsolete then stop any further development for that chip. There's a huge number of old systems out there that are supported by mainline Linux but couldn't run anything newer than Windows XP or 7, and they aren't just laptops. If you have put some money into a piece of hardware that still works perfectly and are forced to ditch it because either its manufacturer or Microsoft suddenly say "sorry, no more drivers, but here's an offer for the new model", that definitely sucks.

Earlier Atoms were close to crap for desktops, but they still have some uses.

I used a N455 based netbook for years as a motorcycle-laptop with a stripped down Debian. Unfortunately I didn't know about Alpine Linux back then, which could likely have made it a lot faster. Also, my home NAS uses a D410 CPU which is enough to support two ZFS pools and other services.

It still makes me angry the Surface Go and Surface Go 2 have inferior screens and build quality to the Atom-powered Surface 3.

Buying an atom netbook was what helped me learn about the difference between in-order and out-of-order CPUs.

I actually upgrade from the 1.66gz atom to a 1.3ghz ULV core 2 duo, and it was way faster.

For nearly 10 years I used a compact netbook with an Intel Atom Z530 1.6 GHz and 1G RAM, a Nokia Booklet 3G. I swapped the HDD for an SDD, and given its fanless unibody aluminum design and its 10.1in 1280x720 screen, it was silent and useable for basic office computing and 720p video, with a full-sized HDMI out. Even with Debian I used to get 6 to 7 hours of battery life. I used it extensively for note taking, dabbling in Python, and writing. It was slow, but more reliable and less buggy than running Debian on my older MacBook Pro (which had hardly any battery life left). I used the Nokia Booklet until its motherboard died in 2018, and I still miss that little machine's compact simplicity and utility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Booklet_3G

The cheap netbook market just kinda died and got replaced by more expensive "ultrabook" market. I used my Samsung N130 quite a bit, only real thing it missed was serial port but no laptops nowadays have it sadly

I would say netbooks were replaced by phones as first computing devices. Can you learn how to program on a phone? Probably not, not the same way you could on a little netbook.

Most consumers buying netbooks weren't buying them for programming, they were buying them to, as their name implies, surf the net, and that made them the first victims of the mobile device revolution as now you could surf the net much better on a phone or tablet and had better UX and much more addictive apps.

Netbooks being used for programming was a very niche use case (maybe not on HN, but in general). Most programmers had more powerful and versatile PCs/laptops at the time for that.

That explains why they disappeared so quickly. But yeah, they were excellent for cheap linux devices.

I dodged the Atom and picked up an Acer 1810tz. 4gb RAM, intel U4100 CPU, ran rings around netbooks at the time and I still use it here and there to this day. Probably the best keyboard I've ever used on such a small device.

Even for in-order vs out-of-order, there's slower and faster.

Early atoms were really slow, compared to e.g. a SiFive P270, which is also in-order.

Out-of-order CPUs exist that are much slower. After all, in-order CPUs can be superscalar still.