(A brief article for Datateknik, May 26, 1999)
Mark Weiser was just 46 years old when, on April 27, he lost his battle with cancer that was discovered just six weeks earlier. Doctors had first given him a year and a half, then three months, and finally only days to live. He tried to use his remaining time to write a book on Ubiquitous Computing, the concept he introduced ten years ago, and which is now becoming a reality. But there wasn't enough time for even a first draft of the book.
Mark Weiser's death shook many in Silicon Valley and beyond. Not just because he was the technical director of Xerox's famous lab, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but because of his character. Mark Weiser was the "soul and conscience" of Silicon Valley, and "he used his institution to remind anyone who would listen that in the battle between man and machine, we must let man win," wrote MSNBC's Bob Sullivan on May 5, 1999.
I interviewed him during a visit to PARC in early 1992 and fondly remember his generosity and broad intellect. He and his team were prototyping a new kind of computing environment where computers were everywhere but not allowed to control our behavior. It was a foretaste of the "third wave," which he saw coming after the PC era, just as it replaced the mainframe era.
"The old kind of computers, the ones that sit on your desk, require you to enter their world," said Mark Weiser, who was inspired by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
In an essay for Scientific American (No. 9 1991) on the computer era of the 21st century, he wrote about how writing technology faded into the background so that people stopped thinking of writing as technology. Similarly, he wanted computers to be, but not to be seen. He didn't like the idea of building even more personal, even "intimate" computers.
"It makes me sick when I hear that! Getting intimate with our computers is not the right way. We want to get computers out of the way! They should be part of our lives, like paper, pens and chairs, but we don't want to get intimate with them." (Datateknik, No. 5 1992.)
In the mid-90s, he coined the term Calm Computing, as a necessary complement to ubiquitous computing.
"With computers everywhere, we will want to use them while doing other things and have more time to be purely human. We will then have to radically rethink the goals, context, and technology of the computer and all the other technologies that intrude on our lives. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design in the next 50 years."
(Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, head of PARC, wrote in The coming age of calm technology,, Xerox PARC, October 5, 1996.)
Hans Sandberg
US Correspondent for the Swedish computer weekly Dagens IT (Today’s IT)
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