Ambient computing has arrived: Here's what it looks like, in my house

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In September 1991, Scientific American published an article by Mark Weiser, the then head of Xerox's PARC computer science laboratory, entitled 'The Computer for the 21st Century'. In that piece he discussed his ideas for a computing infrastructure that would disappear into the background, calling it "ubiquitous computing". 

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Weiser's ubiquitous computing future was one where technology was everywhere, and where we interacted with them through what he called 'tabs', 'pads', and 'walls'. 

He described it as follows: "Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives." 

That third wave of computing is one we're living through, with smartphones, tablet and touch-enabled PCs, and giant flat screens. But it's not a particularly calm world, with all our devices demanding attention, and where we're forced into an unending set of interactions with our screens. 

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