They were hardly the only ones. I remember a lot of companies at the time pushing cheap low end machines designed around internet access, but none really took

They were hardly the only ones. I remember a lot of companies at the time pushing cheap low end machines designed around internet access, but none really took off that I can recall. I imagine that the idea might work better now. For one thing, high speed internet has made web access much more integral to the average user than it was even in 1999. And of course, even a low end computer is actually powerful enough to provide a good user experience for most people. In my experience, that wasn't really true of the offerings in the late 90s.