Oh, the laptop would also need to be crammed with the best music of the last half of the 20th Century. Short on cash? Release someone’s hit album a few months or years ahead of schedule.
Release it how?
Yeah, I’d bring info on the stock market and try to get filthy rich, get into real estate in the silicon valley area and other places that I expect will boom. Obviously, I’ll try to do all this as quickly as possibly before I alter the timeline too much and render my foreknowledge useless.
Once I’ve got millions and millions (dare I say, billions?) I’ll pull up stakes and move to New York or Washington D.C. and throw everything I’ve got into equal rights for women, minorities and the gender variant.
Since I am a middle-aged white guy, I suppose the only thing to do is have two martinis before dinner, smoke a lot, eat tons of red meat and fall asleep in front of my brand new TV.
I wonder whether I could butterfly-effect something to avoid the decline of Detroit?
I’m 50. In order to maintain my own fitness, I’d probably find or even kickstart an early fitness group. I’d have to get new glasses before I went though; I’m fairly certain that the high-refractive-index plastics mine are made of did not exist then, and glass ones would be much smaller and heaver.
And (another thought) the anti-depressant medication I take was not released until 2003. I’d end up near-blind and suicidal.
Now, if I was sent back as a ideally-healthy 19-year-old version of myself without myopia or bad teeth or chronic depression or that thing I had an operation for in 1987, that’s different.
Edit: I’d still hate the smoking though. I could barely watch Mad Men because of the smoking.
Given that the man I’m economically dependent on is my black husband and I am white… god. I guess I’d beg you to leave him behind.
Bring back the obligatory tablet loaded with sports stats and stock info, rest of my case is crammed with spare glasses, Aleve and brewing references. After earning some seed capital gambling/in the market I’d open or buy a brewery and try to start the craft beer revolution a few decades early; might as well make products for homebrewers too, today’s materials and equipment are light years above what was available then. Of course, it was techincally still illegal, but I believe it was legal to sell the products, just not to do it.
I’m a white male, I’d have to make lip service to religion for a few years, but otherwise I’d be OK. Sad that I’ll be too old to really enjoy the 60s.
I’d think that it the OP’s scenario would be especially frustrating for someone in the medical profession, for example if you worked in an OBGYN office you would have to hold your tongue while pregnant women sat and smoked in the waiting room when they came in to get their Thalidomide prescriptions renewed.
If I were comfortable totally ripping off / destroying the careers of my favorite writers, I’d pack my laptop with copies of every amazing Sci-Fi book I could think of, and become the greatest visionary Sci-Fi writer of all time. Probably too late for Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, etc, but I could probably sneak in and “write” The Man in the High Castle, Dune, Flowers for Algernon, Slaughterhouse Five, The Left Hand of Darkness, then cap if off with a bunch of Larry Niven and call it a career.
I’d pack this poster, which would get me credited with tons of new scientific discoveries (most of the ones on the poster are before the 50s, but some would still be revolutionary), pack my kindle loaded with the greatest novels from the 50s to now, crediting me with the invention of modern science fiction among many other things, and bring my iPod loaded with all of the legends, crediting me with the greatest rock and pop songs of all time. Add in the invention of the iPod and Kindle, and things look pretty good.
To be honest, even though I’m a woman and would face endless discrimination, I would do anything to go back. I’d go down as a modern da Vinci, one of the most talented, prolific human beings to ever exist. Come on.
Oh, and I’d be sure to make a time capsule filled with all sorts of creepily specific predictions about the future, so I’d be a magical psychic as well.
ETA: After mentioning da Vinci, it got me thinking - maybe he was a time traveler. Hmm . . .
Do I get younger? Because honestly, if I arrive at the age of 14 with all my current info… shit, I don’t need a computer. Get ID, get a job in the financial services industry, become Gerald Tsai. Sock some money discreetly into little known textiler Berkshire Hathaway, then ignore it for 15 years.
By the time I’m 40, it’s 1978 and my biggest concern is that I’m a market maker - my acumen is (seemingly) so keen and my assets are so large that too many people watch and react to what I’m doing. So it’ll be risky investing in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin.
So I publicly pull a Bill Gates, just 40 years earlier. Still make godless amounts of money, but focus all the PR not to my growing wealth pile (after donating $20+ billion to the foundation, he is still worth $70 billion) but on my efforts to…
Save the space program?
Fight AIDS before anybody knows it’s a thing?
Take the world in a new direction… maybe one based upon my tens of billions of dollars spent on FTL, or longevity treatments, or the ability to upload consciousnesses by 2014?
See, I assume we all will be rich. Hell, just looking at each months initial public offerings tells you all you need to know - “Hey, I see McDonald’s is finally on the NYSE.”, “Oh, look - there’s Walmart.”, “I’d better sink $500 into Berkshire Hathaway, and quick!” I mean… how hard could it be to be the richest person on Earth in 30 years if you know what companies are going to succeed, when, and why? If you know the Soviet Union is a goner. If you know that teflon is coming. And the dot.com rally. And the increase in oil prices in 1973. And the market drop in October 1987. And… etc, everything.
What the big question is, (imho), is what are we going to do with that wealth to make the world better (and different) than today?
I don’t know… $50 billion spent on FTL research might lead to something more interesting than the connection-dominated society we have today.
What would I do if I had to live in 1950s America?
Cross dress. And write.
I’d try to “discover” Marilyn Monroe as soon as possible.
Ugh. Didn’t even think about that. But so much yes. Even more subtle things, like extended bedrest during convalescence. Ever wonder why your nurses are bugging you to get up and walk within hours of major surgery? 'Cause now we know that lying in bed is really, really bad for most people in most situations. Total bedrest leads to a 50% decrease in muscle strength in just 3-5 weeks! After 12 weeks, bone density is reduced by almost 50%. But I’d have absolutely no way to prove that to anyone during a time period when people were still instructed to “rest and regain your strength.” shudder Yeah, I couldn’t do that.
My mother graduated from nursing school in 1951 and was only the second student in that school who had been allowed to stay in school when she married. Another student was a woman who had returned to nursing school after being divorced. The other girls lived on the third floor of the dorm, that one had to live on the first floor, in the rooms where the teachers lived. After all, they couldn’t have “an experienced woman” corrupting all those pure girls upstairs.
In all fairness, it is possible they did not see how a grown woman could live with a bunch of giggling girls in a dorm,
With the possible exception of big, roomy cars, I can’t think of a single reason why I would want to live in the 1950s, even if it meant I’d have money from foreknowledge of the future. I have no nostalgia for the period whatsoever.
On the internet, of course. 
Crap, I forgot.
Head for Colorado Springs and shake Heinlein’s hand. That would be enough right there.
And will we be given the *skills *to do the new job? I’m a pretty good programmer right now … of modern computers. Even twenty-year-old computers, not too much problem. But a 1950s computer? That’s a *very *different skill set.