Mark Weiser

And I don't know what that kid was supposed to do, but we don't have that.

But something that did arrive, Mark Weiser had a vision of ubiquitous computing, where computing could be sort of all over our lives and everywhere.

And that vision has really served us phenomenally well.

It's been tremendously insightful.

Now, of course, if these discussion sound familiar? It's because they are.

This is Mark Weiser.

He's the head of the computer science department at Syracuse Park, just about three miles from here.

I looked up before I came here, which is really cool.

It has come.

We don't just recognize it.

It looks slightly different from the vision that Mark Weiser, who's hailed as one of the fathers of ubiquitous computing, thought of.

He talked about disposable tabs, computers, tablets you could use and then throw aside so they were not personal.

I was not involved in these particular projects, but was around and sort of seeing what went on.

Who's this? the guy with the suspenders, Mark Weiser.

So he had a group at PARC that was developing what they called ubiquitous computing.

And his idea was you didn't want to think of a computer as just that thing on the desk, but it should be all different scales.

So, and if you think about it, this is really a key component of many of these core ideas we've had in human-computer interaction.

For example, here's Mark Weiser, the founder of Ubiquitous Computing.

And when Mark was first motivating this idea, he gives this example of a smart home that knows you might want to drink coffee after you wake up.

Now, it's been decades since Mark first introduced this idea, but how close are we really to systems that understand these kinds of relationships today? For example, take an activity like packing.

Which brings us to the core engine driving us toward the year 2100, the physical future of the computer.

To truly understand where computing is heading, the material looks back at a pivotal meeting the author had over 20 years ago with Mark Weiser.

Mark Weiser.

Weiser was a maverick thinker, a visionary computer scientist at Xerox PARC.

PARC.And for those who don't know, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto was the legendary laboratory that essentially invented the modern digital world.

It disappears.

If a technology doubles in power and halves in size every 18 months for 50 years, it ceases to be an object you place on a desk.

It becomes an invisible fabric, and this directly connects Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing back to the caveman principle.

It's both, and the philosophy is older than the marketing by about 30 years.

Mark Weiser coined ubiquitous computing at Xerox PARC around 1988.

His 1991 Scientific American essay, The Computer for the 21st Century, opens with one sentence.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear.