Mark Weiser was my friend and mentor at the University of Maryland, so I've posted some stuff about his work and life here in the past.

As usual, I've checked and updated the broken links to archive.org. (One of my favorites is the 1995 Computer Chronicals video at the end with a profile of Mark's band, Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet, who upstaged the Rolling Stones over MBone, using up half the bandwidth of the internet on Friday, November 18, 1994!)

History of the Internet - Severe Tire Damage, The Internet’s First Live Band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZn0HW9OHD4

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

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There's this related article:

Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (interconnected.org)

https://interconnected.org/home/2021/08/27/data_sense

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330031

To which I posted this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351064

Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

>Calm Technology

>History

>The phrase "calm technology" was first published in the article "Designing Calm Technology", written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in 1995.[1] The concept had developed amongst researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in addition to the concept of ubiquitous computing.[3]

>Weiser introduced the concept of calm technology by using the example of LiveWire or "Dangling String". It is an eight-foot (2.4 m) string connected to the mounted small electric motor in the ceiling. The motor is connected to a nearby Ethernet cable. When a bit of information flows through that Ethernet cable, it causes a twitch of the motor. The more the information flows, the motor runs faster, thus creating the string to dangle or whirl depending on how much network traffic is. It has aesthetic appeal; it provides a visualization of network traffic but without being obtrusive.[4]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190508225438/https://www.karls...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore...

PDF: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/paper...

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.u...

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170810073340/https://uwspace.u...

>According to Weiser, LiveWire is primarily an aesthetic object, a work of art, which secondarily allows the user to know network traffic, while expending minimal effort. It assists the user by augmenting an office with information about network traffic. Essentially, it moves traffic information from a computer screen to the ‘real world’, where the user can acquire information from it without looking directly at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jeremijenko#Live_Wire_...

>Natalie Jeremijenko

>Live Wire (Dangling String), 1995

>In 1995,[9] as an artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California under the guidance of Mark Weiser, she created an art installation made up of LED cables that lit up relative to the amount of internet traffic. The work is now seen as one of the first examples of ambient or "calm" technology.[10][11]

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20110526023949/http://mediaartis...

[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20100701035651/http://iu.berkele...

>Weiser comments on Dangling String: "Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive."

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20120313074738/http://ipv6.com/a...

>Mark Weiser suggested the idea of enormous number of ubiquitous computers embedding into everything in our everyday life so that we use them anytime, anywhere without the knowledge of them. Today, ubiquitous computing is still at an early phase as it requires revolutionary software and hardware technologies.

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And this article:

Humanist Interface: The Entrenchment of Modern Minimalism (elischiff.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069634

Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150324235751/https://elischiff...

I posted this:

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."
[...]

"Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals."

-Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.c...

"A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool. Eyeglasses are a good tool -- you look at the world, not the eyeglasses. The blind man tapping the cane feels the street, not the cane. Of course, tools are not invisible in themselves, but as part of a context of use. With enough practice we can make many apparently difficult things disappear: my fingers know vi editing commands that my conscious mind has long forgotten. But good tools enhance invisibility."

-Mark Weiser, The World is not a Desktop, ACM Interactions:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141109145219/http://www.ubiq.c...

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Also this article:

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) (depauw.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

I posted this:

Mark Weiser once told me that Ubik was one of his inspirations for Ubiquitous Computing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050307024357/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.

https://blog.canary.is/from-tesla-to-touchscreens-the-journe...

>One year earlier, in 1998, Mark Weiser described it a little differently, stating that, “Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world,” Weiser asserted,“ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.” This wasn’t the first time someone broached the idea of IoT. In the early 1980s, students at Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science department created the first IoT Coke machine. Author Philip K. Dick wrote about the smart home in the 1969 sci-fi novel Ubik, and four decades before, inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla addressed the concept in Colliers Magazine. In an amazingly prescient 1926 interview, Tesla said,

>"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain…We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance…and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."

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

“Five cents, please,” his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn’t changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else. After everything except it had long since reverted, perhaps in the whole city … if not the whole world.

He paid the door a nickel, hurried down the hall to the moving ramp which he had used only minutes ago.

[…]

“I don’t have any more nickels,” G. G. said. “I can’t get out.”

Glancing at Joe, then at G. G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G. G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.

“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when —“ His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.

[…]

“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting towards the door.

“Five cents, please,”

“Pay the door,” Hoe said to G. G. Ashwood.

[...]

“Can I borrow a couple of poscreds from you?” Joe said. “So I can eat breakfast?”

“Mr. Hammond warned me that you would try to borrow money from me. He informed me that he already provided you with sufficient funds to pay for your hotel room, plus a round of drinks, as well as —“

“Al based his estimate on the assumption that I would rent a more modest room than this."

====

Also this video I posted to HN on Mark's birthday:

Time lapse doodle: Mark Weiser’s 1991 “Computer for the 21st Century” [video] (youtube.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929430

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s

I posted this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929598

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.