Back in the early 1990s, I worked in a large telecoms research lab, as part of the Advanced Local Loop group. Our problem domain was the “last mile”—getting services to peoples’ homes. One of my research areas involved thinking about what might happen when the network shift from analog to digital services was complete.
I spent a great deal of time in the lab’s library, contemplating what computing would look like in a future of universal bandwidth. One of the concepts that fascinated me was ubiquitous computing, where computers disappear into the background and software agents become our proxies, interacting with network services on our behalf.
