The Computer for the 21st Century
Mark Weiser’s 1991 article in Scientific American is the founding document of ubiquitous computing. Its most famous line: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear.” Weiser, chief technologist at Xerox PARC, argued that computing should be woven into the fabric of everyday life, invisible and context-aware, rather than demanding human attention. He predicted a world of embedded sensors, networked devices, and displays at three scales (tabs, pads, boards) that fade into the background. This is the earliest articulation of what we now call situation-oriented computing: machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs.