In 1997 I gave a talk at the UIST user interface conference. I brought with me a Palm Pilot upon which I had implemented the computer program that demonstrated the interface I was going to talk about. A colleague of mine pointed out that you can “beam” applications between two Palm Pilots (via the short-range infrared transceiver built into each one), so I beamed the app to him, and we agreed he could pass it on.<\/p>\n
He beamed it to some people, they beamed it to some other people, and so on. The app. spread pretty quickly. By the time I gave my talk later that day, a fairly large contingent in the audience had already played with the program for themselves, and in fact many were trying out various features while I gave the presentation describing those features.<\/p>\n
I thought the entire energy around that process was very exciting. There was something quite friendly and democratic in the way we could share that program around. There was also something rather sweet about how the process itself was so personal – literally passing something on to a friend.<\/p>\n
These days you could write something for the iPhone and upload it for Apple to distribute. What doesn’t happen now is the sort of peer-to-peer grass-roots beaming of things that we were doing on the Palm Pilot back in 1997.<\/p>\n
I kind of miss that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1997 I gave a talk at the UIST user interface conference. I brought with me a Palm Pilot upon which I had implemented the computer program that demonstrated the interface I was going to talk about. A colleague of mine pointed out that you can “beam” applications between two Palm Pilots (via the short-range … Continue reading “Beam me up”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}