Ubiquitous Computing can be thought of as the idea of invisible computers everywhere. Specifically, it is the idea that computers are embedded in the environment, with literally dozens or hundreds of computers available to each person, and each computer performing its tasks without requiring human awareness or a large amout of human intervention.
             If the mainframe represents the era of "many people, one computer", and the PC is the era of "one person, one computer", then ubiquitous computing can be thought of as the era of "one person, many computers". Right now, we work in a time where computers are important, but highly demanding of our attention. We require months (or years) or training to use them properly, we tinker with them constantly in order to make them work properly and to get the best performance out of them, and we still think of their use as a separate, distinct task. What will eventually happen is that computers will fade into the background and become invisible, much in the same way that electricity has, or the way that electrical motors have. When a person goes through their typical day, then encounter, literally, dozens of basic uses of electricity: The alarm clock that wakes them up, the light bulbs overhead, the coffee maker, the motor that starts their car, etc. Unless the person is an Electrical En!
             gineer, they are very unlikely to ever give any of this a second thought. The electricity that they use is taken for granted, despite the very large amount of work that goes into designing the products, along with the enormous amount of infrastructure that is needed to support the power supply. No one contemplates tinkering with the voltage level or hertz rate of their power supply in order to make their alarm clock run better, but the parallel situation is exactly what we have today with computers. Ubiquitous computing will exist when attention to computers as a distinct kind of device is no longer necessary.
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