Ubiquitous computing

The World Is Not A Desktop, by Mark Weiser, in Interactions, January 1994, pp. 7-8.

Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing, by Mark Weiser, in Communications of the ACM, July 1993.

  1. I thought Weiser's Interactions article was very poor considering what I presume his status is. "The idea, as near as I can tell, is that if I could just talk to my computer it would finally understand me." He belittles practically everything. He is never able to effectively articulate, in either article, what he means by "invisible," nor does he explain why he assumes that focussing on producing more effective interaction means that the use of that interaction is more intrusive.

  2. OK, that aside, ubiquitous computing is an intriguing idea, and the "calm technology" in one of the links I followed was intriguing and appealing. But we already have plenty of invisible computers, although they aren't, for the most part, networked. I play the cello because, among other things, it's very low-tech. But I just realized that my electronic tuner must have a computer in it. That's invisible.

    And I had to chuckle at the notion that the LiveBoard is "invisible"!

  3. Weiser covered too much ground. For example, there are plenty of people working on low-power electronics (i.e. half of the people in this building (Cory)).

  4. I didn't understand what one might use tabs for. Are they really like electronic post-it notes? I don't use post-its.

PANs: Personal Area Networks, in The Armchair Scientist - April 96.

IBM Mobile Computing, Personal Area Network (PAN)

  1. The PAN articles describe a) networked personal devices like watch, PDA etc and b) inter-person data communication. The first one is a great idea, and it might happen, unless the consumer manufacturers invent their own standards, which is the most likely outcome. In any case, it doesn't seem all that interesting. The second one is a worry -- do I really want to have all my data transmitted to whomever I contact? Suppose I want to restrict the information -- then I would have a control of some kind on the data card. In which case I might as well just use the card.

  2. The Java folks had a cool idea at Java One (I didn't go). Everybody got a ring containing some data and a scanned business card. To transfer the data you just put the ring on some reader of some kind. I'd prefer that to the inter-personal PAN.

John Reekie, April 16th, 1998.