From a Forbes article on Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus: But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negro

From a Forbes article on Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus: But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups? http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html For years prior to the OLPC, we had been able to make a small laptop with a full OS... The OLPC's AMD Geode CPU was seven years old at the time they chose to use it. What none of the manufacturers realized was that there was any sort of market for a vastly underpowered, almost unusably cramped, extremely cheap laptop that attempts to run a full OS. The media buzz created by the OLPC revealed this market.