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A compelling biography of Mark Weiser, a pioneering innovator whose
legacy looms over the tech industry’s quest to connect
everything—and who hoped for something better. When developers
and critics trace the roots of today’s Internet of Things—our
smart gadgets and smart cities—they may single out the same
creative source: Mark Weiser (1952–99), 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 machine’s 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 Weiser’s family and colleagues, The
Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles Weiser’s struggle to initiate
a new era of computing. Working in the shadows of the dot-com boom,
Weiser and his collaborators made Xerox PARC headquarters the site
of a grand experiment. Throughout the building, they embedded
software into all sorts of objects—coffeepots, pens, energy
systems, ID badges—imbuing them with interactive features. Their
push to integrate the digital and the physical soon caught on.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates flagged Weiser’s Scientific
American article “The Computer for the 21st Century” as a
must-read. Yet, as more tech leaders warmed to his vision, Weiser
grew alarmed about where they wished to take it. In
this fascinating story of an innovator and a big idea, Tinnell
crafts a poignant and critical history of today’s Internet of
Things. At the heart of the narrative is Weiser’s desire for
deeper connection, which animated his life and inspired his notion
of what technology at its best could be.
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