Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things

A compelling biography of Mark Weiser, a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industrys quest to connect everythingand who hoped for something better. When developers and critics trace the roots of todays Internet of Thingsour smart gadgets and smart citiesthey may single out the same creative source: Mark Weiser (195299), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called father of ubiquitous computing. But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machines ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world. Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weisers family and colleagues, Read more