I've spent the last couple of weeks noodling on a project at work which involves these cheap sub $500 laptops, also known as "netbooks," that are all the rage now. All of us in the business of making them vastly underestimated the demand for a cheap, resilient, very portable computer in 2008, and everyone is now furiously trying to figure out how to best capitalize on one of the few bright spots that currently exists in consumer tech spending.

But the fundamental question is simple: are these just cheaper laptops, or a new class of device worthy of new software, new user-experience paradigms, and best of all, new ways of getting people to relate to their computers?

If we are talking about the former and netbooks are just one step on a ruthless road to making ever cheaper electronics that are more disposable, then we might as well just bury the PC now and go on to multi-touching our way to content consumption nirvana— as dumb consumers of media, mediated experiences, and nothing that makes us think too hard.

But if indeed this solid-state, Internet-connected, portable computing experience can lead to something more compelling then we ought to follow it there. The OLPC, which arguably kicked off the interest in ultra-cheap laptops, is as good as D.O.A. but its spirit may still live on in the millions of netbooks that the industry will ship this year, and we owe it to Alan Kay, who first came up with the concept of the "Dynabook—" a small tablet-like networked portable computer for teaching kids, to chase this dream down.

Interestingly, on the 25th anniversary of the Mac— the computer for the rest of us— we might also want to remember Bill Atkinson's original vision for the project before it was co-opted by Steve Jobs: a sub $500 machine that would make computers accessible to new set of folks most in need of them— children and educators. Or the fact that most of the "revolutionary" parts of the original Mac's UI came from... you got it, Xerox PARC, home of the Dynabook.