In 1968, a researcher at Xerox PARC named Alan Kay imagined something he called a "Dynabook": a personal, portable information manipulator small enough to carry anywhere. Nobody had built it yet. The question was whether they ever could.

The first serious attempt arrived in 1975, when IBM released the 5100, a commercially available portable computer the size of a small suitcase. Useful, but hardly pocketable. Engineers called machines like it "luggables".

The real leap came in 1981, when Japanese company Seiko Epson unveiled the HX-20 at a Las Vegas trade show. Patented by an engineer named Yukio Yokozawa, it weighed about one and a half kilograms, ran on a rechargeable battery, and had an LCD screen. Its patent used the words "laptop" and "notebook" for the first time.

Through the early 1980s, the clamshell form took hold. The GRiD Compass 1101, released in 1982 and costing the equivalent of roughly twenty-seven thousand dollars today, found its way to NASA and the military. The word "laptop" itself was traced by etymologists to no later than 1983.

By 1988, displays had reached full VGA resolution. Colour screens followed in 1991. Hard drives shrank to fit. The touchpad arrived in 1983, the pointing stick in 1992. Each generation stripped away another reason to stay at a desk.

The tipping point came quietly. In the third quarter of 2008, worldwide notebook shipments exceeded desktop shipments for the first time: thirty-eight point six million units against thirty-eight point five million. The portable had beaten the stationary.

Prices collapsed alongside dominance. In 2005 the average laptop cost over a thousand dollars. By 2008, low-cost netbooks had dragged that figure below seven hundred. By 2023, a new machine could be had for three hundred dollars, and laptops accounted for roughly sixty-four per cent of all personal computers sold.

The laptop had answered Kay's question. What had begun as a niche tool for soldiers and accountants became the dominant form of personal computing on earth, not by replacing the desk, but by making the desk irrelevant.