I remember my old EEE-PC 701: it got me into Linux, taught me about thin clients, and I've never really looked back. When I moved to the UK to start graduate s

I remember my old EEE-PC 701: it got me into Linux, taught me about thin clients, and I've never really looked back. When I moved to the UK to start graduate school I purchased a huge 17 inch Dell Inspiron. After being dumb enough to loose my bus pass in under a month, I started walking the hour to campus everyday. Pretty soon that beast of a laptop seemed like a pretty bad idea, so I sold it for the EEE-PC and an early e-ink device, the iRex iLliad. When I learned you could just ssh into beefy servers and use those for compute, it basically taught me CLI as well as remote editing. Pretty soon I was distro-hopping on the EEE until I found Arch Linux and then I settled on that. I eventually upgraded to a X31 ThinkPad when I grew tired of the microscopic screen, but without the EEE forcing me to think about a different way to do things I doubt I would have picked up many of my current skills. I even went so far as to install Linux on my Game Boy Advance and used that to check websites and emails on a backpacking trip across Europe.