Liveboard was part of the initial Ubiquitous Computing program at Xerox PARC; the first prototypes of the board were wheeled out to the commons areas at PARC in 1990. And a couple of years later it moved into commercialization. The Liveboard was the largest of the three model form factors that the UbiComp exploration was based on; the other were the pad (a notepad/letter-sized tablet computer) and the tab (a small tag-like device).

Having built the hardware models, the PARC researchers were challenged to discover how they might be used, given they were provided with appropriate software. During 1990 the UbiComp software team ported several applications to the Liveboard (basically added multiple pen input and adjustment in the interface to compensate for the lack of overview you might have when working at the board), and designed from scratch a couple of others that would make the LiveBoards more useful to occasional users.

Reference paper:

Scott Elrod, Richard Bruce, David Goldberg, Frank Halasz, William Janssen, David Lee, Kim McCall, Elin Rønby Pedersen, Ken Pier, John Tang and Brent Welch:
Liveboard: A large interactive display supporting group meetings, presentations and remote collaboration. ISBN:0-89791-513-5, pp. 599-607. This reference paper for Liveboard was presented at CHI 92 in Monterey. ACM Portal to Computing Literature, see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=143052