Aha, found a new cyber word that applies - Laptopia. Yes, that's where I'm living these days. Technically it might be Notebookia, but I like Laptopia better. I mean, 'notebook' was already defined, so if you use that you have to somehow make the distinction between the paper kind and the electronic kind. But 'laptop', hey, it is what it is, no question.

I have a few problems with the laptop which have nothing to do with computing. Despite my long legs, I have a tummy that takes up a portion of my lap. Besides, I rarely sit like a lady should, thus I rarely have a standard lap. Even if I have formed a lap, as soon as I open the laptop it wants to flip backward and take a dive onto the floor. Oh sure, I can anchor it with my wrists then wait for the burn marks on my thighs.

Fortunately, the arm of our sofa is really wide and provides a fairly stable platform (then 'armtop'?). When I need to shift my seating position I can also prop the laptop on a throw pillow. Hmm, then it's a pillowtop, no?

Dang I think I need one of those little white tray thingies they advertise on TV. Oh yes, that's part of my Laptopia world. Beyond this little screen is the bigger screen of my TV. I'm a media junkie. One screenful, even with multiple windows open, isn't enough.

Now and then I remember the history of these devices. About 30 years ago, I operated an IBM 370. It was a behemoth of mute boxes in a carefully air conditioned room and I could only interact with it through a teletype sort of machine with readout onto wide greenbar paper, while a bank of tall refrigerator-sized machines whirled magnetic tapes in the background. (No ringy, no writey. Yellow plastic circles good for games of ring toss while waiting hours for files to process. :)
IBM 370 and peripherals photo 8 whole Mb of processing power? wooooo

About 25 years ago, I typed DOS commands onto a keyboard in front of a huge black screen spouting my input and the IBM 9370's responses in acid green text. The mysterious processing boxes were smaller and grey instead of red and black, but still sitting on a grid of special flooring to hide miles of cable. They were still finnicky about air quality and cooling too.

About 20 years ago, I had to learn Unix/Xenix to talk to 'micros' which weren't all that micro (Digital PDP11s with Bernoulli cartridges, no less). They were much smaller than the IBMs but could still heat a room or serve as excellent boat anchors when defunct. Unix/Xenix was a syntax nightmare compared to DOS, employing series of one letter commands with mathematical symbols rather than something like English. The Bernoulli drives were often built-in! instead of rows of standing sarcophagi for data storage on reels of mag tape.

When I left the industry, micros were called PC's and were pretty much like the desktops we have now, although Bill Gates' supposition that "640K ought to be enough for anybody" gets more and more comical as Microsoft keeps growing Windows versions that could eat Alaska... plus the Yukon Territories... actually the North and South American continents... Good thing the hardware has gotten so small.

Over these same years, I went through a few personal systems at home...

- TRS-80 from Radio Shack (aka Trash-80), basically a smart keyboard, which I hooked up to a 13" black and white TV and a standard portable cassette player for backing up my little BASIC programs. (Hey, when I was in college, I wrote COBOL and typed it on IBM 129 keypunch machines. Carried my card programs around in boxes in the back seat of my VW. The cassettes were a marked improvement! Card jams were disasterous. :)

- Commodore 64C --- The C was for COLOR, by golly! with a GEOS (DOS-like) command set.

- I later moved up with Commodore to the Amiga. Then I could do multimedia, incl my own graphics, and multitasking in windows, long before Windows.

- Alas Commodore lost the US market (selling out to Gateway) and the world was going IBM so I got my first PC. Took a few years before IBM caught up with the multimedia demand, but they got there. Of course, the war with Apple/MAC ensued, and later with Linux, but... here we are.

So now I have a desktop which has more computing capacity than all the computers I ever worked on, together, and multiplied by I don't know how many powers of 10. And this here laptop, which gets me to the world from my living room, or my car, or a hospital bed, or anywhere that's a wi-fi hotspot.

It's a wonderful computing world we live in, eh? So I guess I can put up with the inconvenience of finding a comfy sitting position and dealing with a little heat.

Yes, Laptopia. I think I'll be happy here for a while. If they make them any smaller, my fingers will be too big to use them. I have trouble with the slightly smaller keyboard already, much more with shrinking cellphones.... which reminds me of the heavy black dialer phone we used to have when I was growing up..........