Happy Birthday, Eee PC!

The computer that launched the netbook revolution just turned one-year-old today:

One year ago ASUS began selling a notebook that would change the laptop industry. It was October 16, 2007 that the ASUS Eee PC 701 went on sale in Taiwan (don’t believe us, Wikipedia says so!), ten days later LAPTOP Magazine was one of the first media outlets to review the sub-notebook. Today, we threw that little one-year-old (and now outdated) notebook its first birthday party, with cake and hats and even noise makers (pictures and video of the first-ever laptop birthday party below).

Why a party for the little guy and not any others? Because no matter how you look at it that 7-inch mini-notebook, which was priced at $399 at the time, set off a spark within the laptop industry.

Since its debut 360 days ago, mini-notebooks, now dubbed netbooks, have begun to run off the manufacturing lines of the top laptop companies. HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer all have their own netbooks on the market today. Why? In part, the birth of the ASUS Eee PC proved that consumers were interested in a smaller, low-cost laptop for children or to complement their larger PCs.

ASUS sold over 350,000 Eee PCs in the fourth quarter of 2007 and had sold 1 million by June of 2008. And according to recent reports, the company has now shipped 4 million. That original Eee PC 701 was only the start of ASUS’ plunge into the category and, since then, they have released over 10 netbook models.

More after the link.

Happy birthday, little guy! So young and you've already helped change the world.

P.S. -- To celebrate it's birthday, the Eee just became the first netbook to break the $300 price barrier:

Let's get the sub-$300 netbook party started! Pereira just pinged me to share this Best Buy link which shows the white Asus Eee PC 900A available for $299. This is basically the same model as the 900, but the "A" stands for Atom. As in 1.6 GHz Intel Atom. So it still comes with Linux pre-installed on the 4GB SSD drive and includes 1GB of RAM which is more than plenty. My original Eee PC was pretty zippy when running Linux with just half of that.

At one point, there was discussion of netbooks being an impulse purchase right off the shelf. At under $300, that becomes much more of a likely reality if you can find them on the shelf to begin with. I just checked stock at the nearest five Best Buy locations and sure enough, they all have 'em.

I think I'm starting to drool...

(HT James Kendrick)