History of Ubiquitous Computing

Back in 1988 the phrase Ubiquitous Computing was said for the first time. The man behind these words was Mark Weiser, while he was a Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He and John Seely Brown were the writers of some of the earliest papers about ubicomp, together and by themselves. They made definitions to ubicomp and sketched out its major concerns.

Weiser understood that the extension of processing power into everyday scenarios would need some understanding of social, cultural and psychological phenomena too. He was influenced by philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, post-Modernism, sociology of science and even feminist criticism. Weiser was explicit about "the humanistic origins of the ‘invisible ideal in post-modernist thought'". Interestingly, Weiser places the origins of ubicomp in post-modernism.

Also MIT has made important research about ubicomp. For example Hiroshi Ishii's Things That Think consortium at the Media Lab and the CSAIL effort known as Project Oxygen. Other major contributors are Georgia Tech's College of Computing, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, UCIrvine's Department of Informatics, Microsoft Research, Intel Research and Equator, Ajou-University UCRi & CUS.

Some early work, even the beginning, of ubicomp was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" which were built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994. Tabs and Boards have even ended up commercial products.

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
Ishii, Hiroshi MIT Media Lab - Things That Think Consortium
MIT MIT Project Oxygen: Overview
Weiser, Mark (1996-03-17). Ubiquitous computing

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