Wednesday, 10 November 2010

PARC - touching computing history

At PARC I had the chance to talk to people about some of our current projects. Les Nelson has done interesting work on public displays [1]. This work is highly relevant to ideas we pursue in the pdnet project and it was great to get a first person view from the researchers involved.

Being at PARC history of computing is all around you! Seeing the original Ethernet cable, tapes from Alan Kay or Lucy Suchman, the Alto computer, one of the original laser printer, and different Ubicomp artifacts from Mark Weiser's group really makes you feel that this is a special place for anyone interested in personal computing and ubicomp.

[1] Elizabeth F. Churchill, Les Nelson, and Gary Hsieh. 2006. Cafe life in the digital age: augmenting information flow in a cafe;-work-entertainment space. In CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 123-128. DOI=10.1145/1125451.1125481 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1125451.1125481