Remarkably prescient article from Mark Weiser, originally published {1991} in Scientific American.
The central claim is that powerful technologies disappear, become woven into our environments—like motors, electricity, plastics. Computers (in 1991) were still quite overt, separate places and things. Weiser (and his Xerox PARC) colleagues propose a vision of Ubiquitous computing in which rooms contain hundreds of computational objects, with varying capabilities, which function either in isolation or collaboratively over a network. Activities can be freely moved from large displays (“pads” or “boards”) to small “tabs” which can be pocketed and easily moved around like other household objects.
Q. Explain: “The pad that must be carried from place to place is a failure.”
A. Pads are “scrap computers” (like “scrap paper”), scattered about, cheap, can be grabbed and used anywhere, easily repurposed.
Q. In what sense are pads an “antidote to windows”?
A. They’re not stuck in a tiny rectangle; they can be spread out around the desk, just like papers.
The authors oppose Virtual reality.
“Virtual reality focuses an enormous apparatus on {simulating the world} rather than on {invisibly enhancing the world that already exists}.”
Q. How does Weiser claim that Ubiquitous computing would “reverse the unhealthy forces” that Virtual reality would introduce?
A. In VR, “the outside world and its inhabitants effective cease to exist”; but ubicomp resides “in the human world”.
Dynamicland’s aims substantially overlap, though it’s less interested in putting the computation in the physical objects, and it has various other additional goals (Malleable software, End-user programming, etc).