Augmentation Research Center

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Augmentation Research Center
Company type
Parent
SRI International

SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing.

The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better known by its abbreviation,

computer mouse" pointing device, and its role in the early formation of the Internet
.

Engelbart recruited workers and ran the organization until the late 1970s when the project was commercialized and sold to Tymshare, which was eventually purchased by McDonnell Douglas.[1]

Beginnings

Some early ideas by Douglas Engelbart were developed in 1959 funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (now Rome Laboratory).[2] By 1962, a framework document was published.[3]

J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), funded the project in early 1963. First experiments were done trying to connect a display at SRI to the massive one-of-a-kind AN/FSQ-32 computer at the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.[2]

NASA funding

CDC 3100, which handled a single user at a time. In 1965, Taylor became IPTO director, leading to increased funding. In 1968 an SDS 940 computer running the Berkeley Timesharing System
allowed multiple users.

The project was first called ARNAS after the sponsors. For a few years it was then called the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center, which got shortened to the Augmentation Research Center around 1969.[4]

The Mother of All Demos

During a 90-minute session at the

Fall Joint Computer Conference
in December 1968, Engelbart, Bill English, Jeff Rulifson and other ARC staffers presented their work in a live demonstration, including real-time video conferencing and interactive editing in an era when batch processing was still the paradigm for using computers. This was later called "the Mother of All Demos".

Reference library service

Engelbart had volunteered ARC to provide the first reference library service on the

Internet Network Information Center managed by Elizabeth J. Feinler. Bertram Raphael
was put in charge of the project in 1976.

Sale to Tymshare

The technology was sold to

Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems
, and other leading computer companies.

Tymshare renamed the software Augment and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division. At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity. Operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to do further research. Various executives, first at Tymshare and later at McDonnell Douglas, which acquired Tymshare in 1984, expressed interest in his ideas, but never committed the funds or the people to further develop them. His interest inside of McDonnell Douglas was focused on the enormous knowledge management and IT requirements involved in the life cycle of an aerospace program, which served to strengthen Engelbart's resolve to motivate the information technology arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system.[6] Engelbart retired from McDonnell Douglas in 1986, determined to pursue his work free from commercial pressure.

Books about ARC

The complex story of the rise and fall of ARC has been documented in a book by sociologist

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory nearby, but also as a sociological experiment that constructed and tested methods for group creation and design.[8]

ARC was also indirectly covered in many other books about Xerox PARC, since that is where many ARC employees later fled to (and brought some of Engelbart's ideas with them). Taylor had founded the Computer Systems Laboratory at PARC in 1970.

See also

References

  1. ^ Whitaker, Randall. "Historical Background to CSCW and Groupware: Engelbart's Vision of IT-Driven Organizational Integration". Enola Gaia. Retrieved 2012-02-24.
  2. ^
    ISBN 0-89791-176-8
    . Retrieved April 20, 2011.
  3. ^ Douglas C. Engelbart (October 1962). "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework". SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223; SRI Project No. 3578. Archived from the original on 2011-05-04. Retrieved April 20, 2011.
  4. ^ a b Interview conducted by Judy Adams and Henry Low (December 19, 1986 – April 1, 1987). "Douglas Engelbart". Stanford and the Silicon Valley Oral History Interviews. Stanford University. Archived from the original on 20 April 2011. Retrieved April 19, 2011.
  5. ^ Interviewed by Marc Weber (September 10, 2009). "Oral History of Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler" (PDF). Reference no: X5378.2009. Computer History Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 11, 2011. Retrieved April 20, 2011.
  6. ^ "About OHS - Doug Engelbart Institute".
  7. ISBN 0-8047-3723-1
    .
  8. ISBN 978-0-14-303676-0
    .

Further reading
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