Take 20 minutes out of your day to read this history of laptop music on New Music Box. The writer goes through all the usuals but with a good new music eye. Also, there is this lovely aside, which seems like something out of an 80s sci-fi screenplay:

I initially studied computer science in college, and before I opted for an English degree, my favorite professor was an esteemed figure in the field by the name of Alan J. Perlis, a man who won the very first Turing Award (often described as the Nobel Prize of computing) the year I was born. He would often digress from a sequence of code that he was reciting from memory in order to tell us stories about the dawn of the study of computing. From today's standpoint, in a time of iPods and Tablet PCs, my own college education feels like it occurred during the Stone Age, with those monochrome monitors and rudimentary programming languages. But for Perlis, our cathode-ray computer-lab terminals and the Macintoshes popping up in dormitories were generations removed from his Cretaceous-era schooling.
Prof. Perlis appreciated our difficulty with the problems he assigned each week, those all-nighters we spent eradicating bugs. He told us that when he was a graduate student there was a commonplace way that programmers went about wrestling with a faulty bit of programming: You'd open up the computer you were working on, enter it, sit on a cozy chair and contemplate the machine from the inside. That image has never faded from my memory. If anything, it's become more vivid as computers have gotten smaller. This primer covering the laptop and its role in music today is a peek under the hood, now that the machines have gotten too compact to be entered directly.

[on a related note, I saw X-Men 3 and realized that the only funny/amusing part of the film is that having superpowers allows you to literalize metaphors, however cheap that is a screenplay device]