Today (July 23) is Mark Weiser's birthday, who is considered the father of Ubiquitous Computing.

https://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 contributed to the Boehm–Demers–Weiser Garbage Collector, which works with most unmodified C programs by replacing malloc() and realloc() and removing free() calls. It can also be used to detect memory leaks in non-garbage-collected programs. He used it for the Portable Common Runtime, porting the Cedar programming language and runtime system to Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReport...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/74851.74862

Mark was also the drummer for the avant-garde rock band, "Severe Tire Damage", the first band to broadcast live over the Internet.

https://std.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_Tire_Damage_(band)

https://archive.org/details/CC1232_internet

>The Computer Chronicals, 1995: In the mid 1990's many people were on line, but the internet and the world wide web were still a new phenomenon. This program looks at the new open world of the web. Demonstrations include Eudora, Anarchy, the WELL, WinCIM, InterACT.net, and HoTMetal Pro HTML Editor. Guests include New York Times technology writer John Markoff. Also features a profile of the band Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet. Originally broadcast in 1995. Copyright 1995 Stewart Cheifet Productions.

Mark Weiser passed away on April 27, 1999, from liver cancer.