I was in a $6-an-hour motel in Oakdale, on Long Island, about 50 miles from Times Square. It was going to be my first time.

It was 1974, 40 years ago this week. I was trying, and failing, to file a story by computer — the first, I was told, in the history of The New York Times.

At my end, a bulky, 15-pound behemoth that I called “the blue monster.” (I believe its real name was the TeleRam Portabubble.) At the other, A. M. Rosenthal, The Times’s voluble editor, cackling over my frustration.

Make that “frustrations.” There had been many. As a sportswriter accustomed to filing from the road — in those days, by reading my stories over the phone to a transcriber in New York — I had been asked to take the blue monster on a trial run, to see how it operated under real conditions. So I took the computer to La Salle Military Academy, a prep school in Oakdale, where the New York Stars of the fledgling World Football League were staging their first training camp.