Apple Advanced Technology Group

[1] ATG was an evolution of Apple's Education Research Group (ERG) and was started by Larry Tesler in October 1986 to study long-term research into future technologies that were beyond the time frame or organizational scope of any individual product group.

[4] ATG had research efforts in both hardware and software, with groups focused on such areas as Human-Computer Interaction, Speech Recognition (by Kai-Fu Lee), Educational Technology, Networking, Information Access, Distributed Operating systems, Collaborative Computing, Computer Graphics, and Language/action perspective.

Many of these efforts are described in a special issue of the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin which provided a retrospective of the ATG work after the lab was shut down.

ATG was also home to four Apple Fellows: Al Alcorn, object-oriented software pioneer; Alan Kay; Bill Atkinson; Donald Norman; and laser printer inventor Gary Starkweather.

Further, ATG funded university research and, starting in 1992, held an annual design competition for teams of students.