Just stumbled upon a blog entry titled “Netbooks = Deja vu all over again?” at TechThoughts. It reminded me of a previous blog post of mine in which I was contemplating taking the Pepsi Challenge with a netbook myself. I ultimately decided against it, and I’m glad I did–the 320GB hard drive in my new 17″ notebook ended up getting almost completely filled up. But this was after I discovered that the machine is truly powerful enough to be a desktop replacement… so it accumulated the release candidate of Windows 7, a huge amount of video, and all of the documents that I could successfully convert from the Mac (they make it easy to go from PC to Mac, but not the other way… grrr…)

Ahem. But anyway, back to the other article: the author makes the interesting point that netbooks aren’t a particularly new idea. The author owned a Sony PictureBook back in the bad ol’ days of Windows Me. It actually had more capabilities than the MacBook Air, arguably the machine that started the netbook movement, depending on whom you ask. And it was an interesting machine in the annals of computing history, in that it is one of the very few machines ever released to use the Transmeta Crusoe processor.

How will history treat the netbook craze? Are they a fad? A nice, cheap computer to use to look for jobs with as the economy emerges from the brink of ruin? Or will they become a fixture in every household? The kind of computer issued to every new kindergärtner? Time will tell.