4Ubiquity
The term ‘ubiquitous computing’ names a program of computer science–based research that originated in a fabled Silicon Valley research laboratory located in California, USA, in the late 1980s. Articulating a singular and compelling vision of an alternative to then-dominant paradigms of personal computing, Mark Weiser, who directed the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), published in Scientific American an article that was partly a manifesto and partly a progress report (Weiser, 1991). Weiser noted that early computing efforts had been characterized by large-scale mainframe computers that were shared by many users through so-called time-sharing technologies. In the 1970s, the time-sharing ...
