Greenfield: The everyware future

The most important thing to get right at the outside is that it is an historical document now. I mean it was written in 2005, it was published in 2006, and so it may retain some value. But it is essentially a snapshot of the way we thought the technological future was unfolding in the mid 2000's. Reality has turned out otherwise. The book starts with the work of a guy named Mark Weiser. Mark Weiser who is the Chief Technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the mid 1990's. And he saw very clearly that we are removing from the mainframe with its one machine to many user relationship through the one-to-one relationship of the personal computer towards a place where there be many computational devices and services addressing the needs of a single human individual. And as the transition from the mainframe to the personal computer required a new mode of user interface, a new way of understanding the human interaction with that computational power, so to, with the transition towards what he termed ubiquitous computing, requiring new modes of thinking about interface, new ways of thinking about human beings interacting with this computational power.