[HN Gopher] Time lapse doodle: Mark Weiser's 1991 "Computer for ...
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Time lapse doodle: Mark Weiser's 1991 "Computer for the 21st
Century" [video]
Author : DonHopkins
Score : 25 points
Date : 2021-07-23 11:15 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| neilv wrote:
| As an ignorant student who was newly moving towards a fusion of
| HCI and AI at the time, I didn't really know who Mark Weiser was,
| but he seemed very personable, down-to-earth, and kind, when
| recruiting me as a student for a new project at PARC. I also got
| the sense that he was looking out for what's best for me.
|
| (Not recruiting me because I was special enough to draw his
| attention on my own merits. I think probably he asked a professor
| if they knew any students who wanted to work on ubiquitous
| computing at PARC, I heard about it, and I said something to the
| effect of "Xerox PARC and ubiquitous computing? Holy crud, yes,
| OMG, yes, pleasepleaseplease pick me...")
|
| The single biggest mistake of my life was that I chose a
| different opportunity over that.
|
| What I've known of PARC seems not just about thoughtfulness and
| creativity, but also seemed in at least some cases to be
| motivated by very genuine and forward-thinking altruistic
| intentions.
|
| I suspect that's something to keep in mind when looking at pre-
| Web-boom PARC work. It might be more explicit in some projects
| (e.g., in some of the Smalltalk-related work on education and
| empowerment for children), and implicit in other projects (e.g.,
| implicitly wanting to elevate people's individual and
| collaborative potential; wouldn't even think of exploiting them).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Mark was my mentor and boss and undergrad advisor at the
| University of Maryland. Yes, he was very kind and personable,
| and he had a nice overstuffed comfy chair for visitors to sit
| on in his office at UMD. I totally agree with you about the
| thoughtfulness, creativity, and altruistic motivations of the
| people at PARC.
|
| I was extremely lucky and privileged to be introduced to Mark
| when I was in high school, and he gave me an account on Mimsy,
| the UMD CS Department's Vax 11/780 running 4.1 BSD. Once I
| finally enrolled as an undergrad student, he hired me to work
| on the CS department systems staff, and invited me to join his
| Heterogeneous Systems Laboratory.
|
| I enjoyed the the university people and environment so much,
| and had so many fun toys to play with, that it took me 6 years
| to finally get my shit together and graduate!
|
| By then he'd left to run Xerox PARC. It was hard for the CS
| Department to lose him, but it was the perfect job for him.
|
| I was offered an internship at PARC when I graduated in 1990,
| but after I was accepted, they belatedly told me I was required
| to submit to a pre-employment urine test.
|
| So I took and passed the test, then turned the job down, by
| writing a letter to the CEO of Xerox explaining why, then went
| to work for Sun instead.
|
| I certainly regret missing the opportunity to work at PARC and
| with Mark and other great people, but I don't regret my
| decision to take the test, turn down the job, and write a
| letter explaining why, and there were no hard feelings on
| either side.
|
| I discussed it recently in the recent thread about "Amazon
| backs marijuana legalization, drops weed testing for some
| jobs":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365388
|
| >They certainly used to, and still do in many places. I turned
| down a job at Xerox PARC in 1990 because of their ill conceived
| drug testing policy, after taking and passing their drug test.
| The actual employees at PARC were overwhelmingly against the
| corporate drug testing policy, and regretted but supported me
| turning down the job offer, and Xerox eventually changed their
| ill conceived policy.
|
| I wrote Mark about the piss test, and this is his reply. I took
| his sagely advice, and wrote a letter explaining why I turned
| the job down, which I faxed to Paul Allaire (CEO of Xerox) and
| the ACLU:
|
| Date: Mar 15, 1990, 6:14 PM From: Mark Weiser
| <mark@arisia.xerox.com> To: hopkins, weiser.pa
|
| The piss test is horrible, awful, invades privacy, is the
| stupidest thing Xerox has ever done (even worse than fumbling
| the Alto, because that did not hurt anyone except stockholders
| pockets.) Asking questions about it certainly does not mean
| losing the job--we have great respect for people who ask such
| questions, as everyone here did and continues to do. The
| resistance has dropped to a dull roar, we are resigned to
| living it with it for awhile, and hoping it will go away (there
| is some chance, but not anytime this year or next).
|
| But meanwhile, there is not much anyone can do. It has been
| appealed up and down, by me personally among others, and it
| just is going to stand for the time being.
|
| If you felt so strongly about it that you felt you could not
| take the test, I would understand, but then PLEASE write a
| letter saying that is the reason you did not come. Ammunition.
|
| Its hard for me to encourage you to take the test, since I also
| disagree with it. I don't know what I would do in your shoes. I
| would like to have you here this summer. That means you need to
| take the piss test. So I guess I hope you decide you will. But
| its got to be a personal decision. Honestly, no hard feelings
| either way.
|
| You ask "I'd like to talk about it, to find out what is going
| on and why, and who I can direct the questions to, in order to
| do the most good".
|
| There probably is not anyone like that. Everyone at PARC seems
| to think the test is a terrible idea, from the top management
| on down, including the personnel people. You could talk to our
| personnel guy, bill skinner, with your questions. Phone him at
| 415-xxx-xxxx, if you like. He'll give you the standard
| institutional answers, but he is a nice guy and it is his job
| to know all the details about the tests, why, etc. Absolutely
| no bad consequences from asking questions.
|
| -mark
|
| Date: Wed, 2 May 90 17:01:40 PDT From: Bill_Skinner:PARC:xerox
| To: Weiser:PARC:xerox Subject: Hopkins passes drug test
|
| Mark/Joe (Charlton):
|
| Xerox Medical emailed Mae this morning to say that Don Hopkins'
| drug test results were negative. I called and left a message
| for him at home.
|
| Bill
|
| Urine Saga:
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hemp/urine-saga.html
|
| >I sent a letter to Paul Allair, CEO of Xerox Corporation,
| turning down a summer internship that I had been offered at
| Xerox PARC, because of their pre-employment urine testing
| policy -- after I had taken and passed the urine test. But it
| was not so easy -- the story follows... [...]
|
| Conversation with Dan Calvin, UMD Urine Czar:
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hemp/urine-czar.html
|
| >[...] He said that whatever I did, it would only be a drop in
| the bucket, and wouldn't mean anything.
|
| >I said that at least it would be a drop in the right bucket.
|
| Letter to Paul Allaire:
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hemp/xerox-letter.html
|
| >[...] Even though I passed the drug test, and am completely
| qualified for the summer internship at Xerox PARC, I must turn
| it down because of the drug testing policy. I couldn't feel
| good about working for Xerox after the violation of my privacy,
| the ordeal I've been through, and the lack of respect I've been
| shown. The decision was a painful one: regardless of the cloud
| of urine testing hanging over it, Xerox PARC is a most
| prestigious place, where I could have been exposed to many
| great ideas, and met some of the best people in the profession.
|
| >I wish I could have spent the summer at Xerox PARC, but
| instead I have taken a full time job at Sun Microsystems, a
| company that respects its employees enough to provide a drug
| free work place without invading their privacy. I won't be
| looking for other employment in the forseeable future, but I
| would be delighted to hear when Xerox has changed its drug
| testing policy. Until such a time, I hope that potential job
| applicants learn about the policy before they decide to apply.
|
| >I sympathize with my colleagues who work in positions they
| would no longer be willing to accept on moral grounds, and who
| have been forced to compromise their principles because of
| other responsibilities.
|
| >"What are politicians going to tell people when the
| Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?"
|
| >-- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
| rootbear wrote:
| Thanks, Don. I took a class from Mark at UMCP but I can't
| remember which one just now. He was one of my favorite
| instructors and I was sad when he went to PARC, but much sadder
| still when he died at such a young age.
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