Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is a concept in computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. “Ubiquitous Computing” term was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC.

Alan Kay uses “Third Paradigm” computing term to describe this concept.

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“Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1” displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work “ubiquitous computing”. This is different from PDA’s, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.” - Weiser [1]

“Ubiquitous computing is the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user.” - Weiser [2]

This paradigm is also described as pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, or, more recently, everywhere where each term emphasizes slightly different aspects.

[1] M. Weiser, “The World Is Not a Desktop,” ACM Interactions, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 1994, pp. 7–8.

[2] M. Weiser, “Hot topics-ubiquitous computing,” Computer, vol. 26, no. 10, pp. 71–72, 1993.