>Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
As manager of the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory, he wrote the seminal 1992 Scientific American article, "The Computer for the 21st Century". He became Chief Technology Officer of Xerox PARC in 1996.
Mark taught Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and became chairman of the CS department in 1986. Under his guidance, the department received a grant of 40 Xerox Star workstations, plus file servers and laser printers, from Xerox PARC, and another grant from NSF for Z-Mob, a Z-80 parallel processor, "The Computer of the Future, using The Processor of the Past", which they used to buy Sun workstations.
Thanks, Don. I took a class from Mark at UMCP but I can't remember which one just now. He was one of my favorite instructors and I was sad when he went to PARC, but much sadder still when he died at such a young age.
During 2010-2017, I worked on creating a "pocket server", the size of a keyfob, which would be the basis of a pads/tabs/boards personal computing environment. It would connect to any number of local screen devices via Bluetooth or Wifi Direct.
It failed because I had no prior experience of developing hardware, and had rather a lot of back luck with HW engineering contractors and contract manufacturers. Some of the story is recounted at https://changelog.com/posts/how-i-volunteered-to-rearchitect...
As an ignorant student who was newly moving towards a fusion of HCI and AI at the time, I didn't really know who Mark Weiser was, but he seemed very personable, down-to-earth, and kind, when recruiting me as a student for a new project at PARC. I also got the sense that he was looking out for what's best for me.
(Not recruiting me because I was special enough to draw his attention on my own merits. I think probably he asked a professor if they knew any students who wanted to work on ubiquitous computing at PARC, I heard about it, and I said something to the effect of "Xerox PARC and ubiquitous computing? Holy crud, yes, OMG, yes, pleasepleaseplease pick me...")
The single biggest mistake of my life was that I chose a different opportunity over that.
What I've known of PARC seems not just about thoughtfulness and creativity, but also seemed in at least some cases to be motivated by very genuine and forward-thinking altruistic intentions.
I suspect that's something to keep in mind when looking at pre-Web-boom PARC work. It might be more explicit in some projects (e.g., in some of the Smalltalk-related work on education and empowerment for children), and implicit in other projects (e.g., implicitly wanting to elevate people's individual and collaborative potential; wouldn't even think of exploiting them).
Mark was my mentor and boss and undergrad advisor at the University of Maryland. Yes, he was very kind and personable, and he had a nice overstuffed comfy chair for visitors to sit on in his office at UMD. I totally agree with you about the thoughtfulness, creativity, and altruistic motivations of the people at PARC.
I was extremely lucky and privileged to be introduced to Mark when I was in high school, and he gave me an account on Mimsy, the UMD CS Department's Vax 11/780 running 4.1 BSD. Once I finally enrolled as an undergrad student, he hired me to work on the CS department systems staff, and invited me to join his Heterogeneous Systems Laboratory.
I enjoyed the the university people and environment so much, and had so many fun toys to play with, that it took me 6 years to finally get my shit together and graduate!
By then he'd left to run Xerox PARC. It was hard for the CS Department to lose him, but it was the perfect job for him.
I was offered an internship at PARC when I graduated in 1990, but after I was accepted, they belatedly told me I was required to submit to a pre-employment urine test.
So I took and passed the test, then turned the job down, by writing a letter to the CEO of Xerox explaining why, then went to work for Sun instead.
I certainly regret missing the opportunity to work at PARC and with Mark and other great people, but I don't regret my decision to take the test, turn down the job, and write a letter explaining why, and there were no hard feelings on either side.
I discussed it recently in the recent thread about "Amazon backs marijuana legalization, drops weed testing for some jobs":
>They certainly used to, and still do in many places. I turned down a job at Xerox PARC in 1990 because of their ill conceived drug testing policy, after taking and passing their drug test. The actual employees at PARC were overwhelmingly against the corporate drug testing policy, and regretted but supported me turning down the job offer, and Xerox eventually changed their ill conceived policy.
I wrote Mark about the piss test, and this is his reply. I took his sagely advice, and wrote a letter explaining why I turned the job down, which I faxed to Paul Allaire (CEO of Xerox) and the ACLU:
Date: Mar 15, 1990, 6:14 PM
From: Mark Weiser <mark@arisia.xerox.com>
To: hopkins, weiser.pa
The piss test is horrible, awful, invades privacy, is the stupidest thing
Xerox has ever done (even worse than fumbling the Alto, because that did
not hurt anyone except stockholders pockets.) Asking questions about it
certainly does not mean losing the job--we have great respect for
people who ask such questions, as everyone here did and continues to do.
The resistance has dropped to a dull roar, we are resigned to living it
with it for awhile, and hoping it will go away (there is some chance, but
not anytime this year or next).
But meanwhile, there is not much anyone can do. It has been appealed up and
down, by me personally among others, and it just is going to stand for
the time being.
If you felt so strongly about it that you felt you could not take the test,
I would understand, but then PLEASE write a letter saying that is
the reason you did not come. Ammunition.
Its hard for me to encourage you to take the test, since I also disagree
with it. I don't know what I would do in your shoes. I would like
to have you here this summer. That means you need to take the piss test.
So I guess I hope you decide you will. But its got to be a personal decision.
Honestly, no hard feelings either way.
You ask "I'd like to talk about
it, to find out what is going on and why, and who I can direct the
questions to, in order to do the most good".
There probably is not anyone like that. Everyone at PARC seems to think
the test is a terrible idea, from the top management on down, including
the personne...
I feel like much of this has come to pass, in ways we didn't imagine. You can buy a microprocessor more powerful than the Xerox Star for pennies now and they're in everything. Some of them are Calm and unobtrusive, like my toothbrush reminds me to switch quadrants and brush for two minutes. All those "home assistant" speakers, lightbulbs, smart tv's and connected sous vide machines are kinda useful. Badges and phone numbers that follow your movements are here obviously.
But pretty much nobody in 1991 (except for notable fiction authors) understood the societal impact and weaponization of ubiquitous computing for surveillance, population control, ad tech, and the personal information economy however.
6 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser
https://web.archive.org/web/19990204012721/http://www.ubiq.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
>During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing:
>The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
>The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
>The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
>Technology should create calm.
>In Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and John Seely Brown describe calm technology as "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."
https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990117104244/http://www.ubiq.c...
>Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
As manager of the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory, he wrote the seminal 1992 Scientific American article, "The Computer for the 21st Century". He became Chief Technology Officer of Xerox PARC in 1996.
Draft:
https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/presentations/Marc_Wei...
September 1991 Scientific American article:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-computer-for-...
Scan:
https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Weiser-SciAm.p...
Time Lapse Doodle Summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s&ab_channel=Nicol...
Mark taught Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and became chairman of the CS department in 1986. Under his guidance, the department received a grant of 40 Xerox Star workstations, plus file servers and laser printers, from Xerox PARC, and another grant from NSF for Z-Mob, a Z-80 parallel processor, "The Computer of the Future, using The Processor of the Past", which they used to buy Sun workstations.
https://www.cs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/zelkowitz-report....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21756938
He contribut...
It failed because I had no prior experience of developing hardware, and had rather a lot of back luck with HW engineering contractors and contract manufacturers. Some of the story is recounted at https://changelog.com/posts/how-i-volunteered-to-rearchitect...
(Not recruiting me because I was special enough to draw his attention on my own merits. I think probably he asked a professor if they knew any students who wanted to work on ubiquitous computing at PARC, I heard about it, and I said something to the effect of "Xerox PARC and ubiquitous computing? Holy crud, yes, OMG, yes, pleasepleaseplease pick me...")
The single biggest mistake of my life was that I chose a different opportunity over that.
What I've known of PARC seems not just about thoughtfulness and creativity, but also seemed in at least some cases to be motivated by very genuine and forward-thinking altruistic intentions.
I suspect that's something to keep in mind when looking at pre-Web-boom PARC work. It might be more explicit in some projects (e.g., in some of the Smalltalk-related work on education and empowerment for children), and implicit in other projects (e.g., implicitly wanting to elevate people's individual and collaborative potential; wouldn't even think of exploiting them).
I was extremely lucky and privileged to be introduced to Mark when I was in high school, and he gave me an account on Mimsy, the UMD CS Department's Vax 11/780 running 4.1 BSD. Once I finally enrolled as an undergrad student, he hired me to work on the CS department systems staff, and invited me to join his Heterogeneous Systems Laboratory.
I enjoyed the the university people and environment so much, and had so many fun toys to play with, that it took me 6 years to finally get my shit together and graduate!
By then he'd left to run Xerox PARC. It was hard for the CS Department to lose him, but it was the perfect job for him.
I was offered an internship at PARC when I graduated in 1990, but after I was accepted, they belatedly told me I was required to submit to a pre-employment urine test.
So I took and passed the test, then turned the job down, by writing a letter to the CEO of Xerox explaining why, then went to work for Sun instead.
I certainly regret missing the opportunity to work at PARC and with Mark and other great people, but I don't regret my decision to take the test, turn down the job, and write a letter explaining why, and there were no hard feelings on either side.
I discussed it recently in the recent thread about "Amazon backs marijuana legalization, drops weed testing for some jobs":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365388
>They certainly used to, and still do in many places. I turned down a job at Xerox PARC in 1990 because of their ill conceived drug testing policy, after taking and passing their drug test. The actual employees at PARC were overwhelmingly against the corporate drug testing policy, and regretted but supported me turning down the job offer, and Xerox eventually changed their ill conceived policy.
I wrote Mark about the piss test, and this is his reply. I took his sagely advice, and wrote a letter explaining why I turned the job down, which I faxed to Paul Allaire (CEO of Xerox) and the ACLU:
Date: Mar 15, 1990, 6:14 PM From: Mark Weiser <mark@arisia.xerox.com> To: hopkins, weiser.pa
The piss test is horrible, awful, invades privacy, is the stupidest thing Xerox has ever done (even worse than fumbling the Alto, because that did not hurt anyone except stockholders pockets.) Asking questions about it certainly does not mean losing the job--we have great respect for people who ask such questions, as everyone here did and continues to do. The resistance has dropped to a dull roar, we are resigned to living it with it for awhile, and hoping it will go away (there is some chance, but not anytime this year or next).
But meanwhile, there is not much anyone can do. It has been appealed up and down, by me personally among others, and it just is going to stand for the time being.
If you felt so strongly about it that you felt you could not take the test, I would understand, but then PLEASE write a letter saying that is the reason you did not come. Ammunition.
Its hard for me to encourage you to take the test, since I also disagree with it. I don't know what I would do in your shoes. I would like to have you here this summer. That means you need to take the piss test. So I guess I hope you decide you will. But its got to be a personal decision. Honestly, no hard feelings either way.
You ask "I'd like to talk about it, to find out what is going on and why, and who I can direct the questions to, in order to do the most good".
There probably is not anyone like that. Everyone at PARC seems to think the test is a terrible idea, from the top management on down, including the personne...
But pretty much nobody in 1991 (except for notable fiction authors) understood the societal impact and weaponization of ubiquitous computing for surveillance, population control, ad tech, and the personal information economy however.