Ian alerted me of this via a roundabout source - it turns out the 1954 PC is a hoax!

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

Many a prognosticator who has tried to envision the future has been tripped up by a failure to correctly anticipate the direction of technological change. Those who would forecast the world of tomorrow have often made the mistaken of simply taking the technologies of their day and assuming that in the future those technologies would be bigger, faster, and more powerful - what escaped their vision was that science and society might come up with new and different ways of manufacturing and using those technologies.

One case in point is the computer. Predictions from several decades ago failed to foresee that computers would become much smaller and cheaper; that these changes would enable nearly every business and home to have its own computer to be used for a variety of applications, and that those machines would be linked together in a world-wide network. Instead, futurist scenarios frequently presented a world of very few, very expensive all-powerful computers the size of large buildings, used only for divining answers to complex problems beyond the ability of man to solve on his own.

Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to an image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television.