Augmentation Research Center

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.

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] Some early ideas by Douglas Engelbart were developed in 1959 funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (now Rome Laboratory).

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.

[4] 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.

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.

[7] From the perspective of the 1960s counter-culture revolution, John Markoff, in his book What the Dormouse Said, also follows Englebart's persistence in creating ARC as not only a collection of talented off-beat engineers working in direct contrast to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory nearby, but also as a sociological experiment that constructed and tested methods for group creation and design.