Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for February 14, 1998

Once in a while I hear a younger person assert that the term ‘desktop’ was derived from ‘laptop’. Ha! ‘Desktop’ came first, when computers became compact enough to, you guessed it, sit atop one’s desk; before that, the smallest general-purpose computer was more like a kitchen stove. I doubt that ‘laptop’ would ever have been coined if not for the precedent of ‘desktop’.