If you frequented Kendall Square in the 1990s, you may have encountered one of the pioneers of wearable computing, students who ambled around Cambridge wearing special goggles with built-in cameras and display screens, toted computers in backpacks and messenger bags, and palmed special one-handed keypads so they could enter data. Sprouting wires everywhere, they looked like cyborgs late for a Halloween party.

Thad Starner (Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech) was part of the bunch, who called themselves the “borgs.”

"It was clear to me that this was going to be a lifestyle that was compelling," says Starner, who began wearing a computer and display regularly in 1993. "Wherever I was, I could pull up local maps. I would learn stuff from having hallway conversations with other researchers, and I had a system that let me take notes to remember what they said." The rest of us, however, just weren’t ready to don computers.