Calm Technology

Chapter 6. The History and Future of Calm Technology

XEROX PARC (PALO ALTO Research Center) was founded in 1970 as the Research & Development Lab of the Xerox Corporation. The name “Xerox” today is most commonly associated with copiers and printers, but from the ‘70s to the late ‘90s, Xerox PARC was a hub of alternative and groundbreaking computing research, spanning every type of technological device imaginable. The number of breakthrough innovations that emerged from PARC in the ’70s is legendary, from precursors to the modern graphic user interface, object-oriented programming, and desktop publishing to the first widespread adoption of Douglas Engelbart’s mouse.

Figure 6-1. PARC researchers in 1972, two years after founding. PARC’s office spaces were filled with people from different disciplines, allowing for different thinking about computing in general.^[34]

My focus in this book has been on a somewhat later chapter in PARC’s history: a body of work whose real value is just now starting to reveal itself. In the 1980s, three PARC researchers—Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown, and Rich Gold—began to envision a future in which people interacted with many small devices in their lives, what Weiser called “pads, tabs, and boards.” Their work took place long before mobile devices had any real computing power, yet they managed to make working prototypes of a mobile ...