Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

I recall reading an article about 10 years ago describing a PARC research project in which networked computers with antennae were placed throughout a set of rooms, and the subject carried a small transmitter with them from room to room. As the computer in each room detected the transmitter, it triggered actions in each room. I think it was called "ambient computing."

Does this ring a bell for you? I have searched for this article recently and not been able to find it again.

Yes, this idea was originally Nicholas Negroponte's in the 70s. The Parc version was called "Ubiquitous Computing" and was led by Mark Wieser in the 80s ...

Now that's geofencing, smart homes, etc... Apps like Tasker on Android can do some of it.

You are thinking of something else ...

Thanks! This research was my first thought when I saw big companies starting to come out with things like smart watches, hyper-local beacons, and home automation products.

But strangely, it seems like companies are still treating those all as separate lines. For example, Apple markets their home and watch projects totally independently of one another. But I have to think that they are working toward ubiquitous computing, much as they worked toward the Dynabook over the decades.

This is only version accessible to most people today. Where the contextually driven actions are performed by your smartphone, not by the swarm of devices in your vicinity.

A few devices issuing orders, and a bunch of dumb devices taking orders.

Didn't Apple just announced using your watch to unlock your computer for example?

The people working in R&D at these companies (i.e. Apple) are to varying extents aware of this history. Indeed there are different "brands" for a set of concepts that have be evolving since the 70s, IoT being the most popular term in public discourse as of the past few years, and "ubiquitous computing" having fallen almost completely out of favor except in academic circles.

Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish wrote an interesting book few years ago that argued that Nicholas Negroponte's and Mark Wiser's visions had indeed come to pass, as predicted over and over again, just by different names and under guises we that we didn't recognize: https://www.amazon.com/Divining-Digital-Future-Mythology-Ubi.... The story continues!

Olivetti had a similar thing that was called 'activebadge'.

The article was a profile of PARC in Scientific American, but I cannot tell you the specific issue. .