The laptop : design or desire?

The laptop computer has largely managed to retain its initial status as a marker of executive sensibilities – an electronic briefcase of cutting-edge technology. The first true laptop was the ‘Compass’ computer by GRiD Systems, which has been presented as a result of the convergence of technologies - a product that was ‘ready to happen’. This rhetoric of determinism [in this context, ‘design’] is, at odds with the long history of attempts to produce a portable computer [the desire]. This paper aims to use the case study of the laptop computer to highlight the tension between the discourses of technological determinism and the social construction of technology.