If this was 1954, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing right now.

Type these words on a TV screen.

I certainly would have been able to type these words on a piece of paper. There were typewriters in 1954, although the first IBM Selectric was about seven years in the future.

Typing whatever I wrote would certainly be more legible than my handwriting, which is not much better in 2024 than it was in 1954.

But if I used a typewriter, I wouldn’t have been able to cleanly change the word “distance” to “future” two paragraphs up without either xxxxxxxxing it out or crumpling the piece of paper I was using into a ball and throwing it in the garbage. 

(I also wouldn’t have been able to use Liquid Paper, the popular correction fluid that was invented two years after I was born by Bette Nesmith Graham, the mother of future Monkees guitarist Michael Nesmith.)

Computers were not unknown in 1954. They just weren’t anywhere near peoples’ homes. They were in labs and research centers, and took up hundreds of square feet of space.

The first home computers – or personal computers – were put together by tech hobbyists from kits. They followed innovations in reducing the size of semiconductors and advanced circuitry.

Eventually, the whole computer was sold to people who had no interest in soldering wires and touching a screwdriver. Commodore, Tandy and Apple sold what we would consider clunky machines with floppy discs that held only as much data as 10 seconds of any song on your current iTunes.

IBM’s launching of the PC began the real breakthrough to the mass audience, its operating system being built by a new company called Microsoft. Eventually, other companies adopted Microsoft’s MS/DOS and then Windows as their system, with Intel chips providing the power; IBM exited the PC business in 2005, selling it to the Chinese company Lenovo.

Most of the early machines were desktops, with separate monitors and computer cases, and cables attaching them. Apple pioneered desktops with the hard drive and CPUs inside the monitor.

I’m not writing this on a desktop. I’m writing it on a laptop, which I can take anywhere as long as the battery lasts. It not only holds everything I’ve written for the past six years, it holds my photos, some of my music, spreadsheets for baseball stats, a Web browser to get information and watch Brandon Nimmo’s 2022 catch over the center field wall at Citi Field for the 2,015th time, and OOTP 24, the best computer baseball game ever.

Once I finish writing this, I’ll save the file and publish it on my blog in a few days. 

There are people nostalgic for typewriters, for ledgers, for photo albums, for record players, for VCRs, for newspapers, for cookbooks, for tape recorders, for board games, for alarm clocks, for date books, for phone directories.

I’m not. I’ve got it all in less than two square feet on my desk. People in 1954 might have imagined all this, but the reality still would have amazed them.

Now, if only I could stop using this thing and get to sleep.