12 ms·

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to join SRI International

257 points by sonoffett 3y ago

osnium123 3y ago
Will this mean that PARC will transition towards doing more government funded research? SRI is pretty heavily funded by the government as far as I know.
- rchiang 3y ago
  The Morningstar article had a few more details that I couldn't find anywhere else: "As part of the donation, Xerox will enter into a preferred research agreement, called the Technology Exploration and Innovation Program, in which SRI will provide contracted research and development services to Xerox and its clients. Through the collaborative program, Xerox and SRI will identify topic areas relevant to Xerox’s core print, digital and IT Services business, with the final goal of creating proofs-of-concept and roadmaps to implementation. Xerox will also retain a branded Innovation Hub at PARC to host meetings, demonstrations and annual conferences for its clients." It's unclear what the size of this revenue stream is compared to SRI's current revenues.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    TIL there is an investment oriented news site called https://morningstar.com https://morningstar.com. Was struggling to figure out why the Communist Party of Great Britain’s newspaper (https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/ https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/) would have relevant coverage of this topic. Although I suppose the machinations of the Silicon Valley/US government research establishment have probably been of intense interest to international socialism since the 1960s..
- gumby 3y ago
  PARC has been doing government funded research from the beginning (ARPA); after they were semi-spun off from Xerox they were primarily funded the same as SRI: government grants and corporate contracting.
usr1106 3y ago
As a software engineer since the 1980s, of course I know (Xerox) PARC. But am I the only one for whom SRI does not ring any bells? I'm confident Wikipedia can tell me more, but if they don't tell in their press release I would claim they might overestimate their "brand".
- ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
  IIRC basically a Pentagon funded think tank in Silicon Valley, though their best days were really the 1970s and 1980s.
  - VagueMag 3y ago
    Yeah SRI was what emerged when military/intelligence related work needed to be separated from Stanford University proper as a result of campus protests in the 60s over the university's involvement in chemical weapons and counterinsurgency research.
    - usr1106 3y ago
      If that is true it gives me the kind of background I was looking for.
  - Animats 3y ago
    Yes. I dealt with them a lot in my aerospace days. Boyer and Moore used to work there. I used their theorem prover for early proof of correctness work.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  SRI was one of the original nodes of the ARPAnet, and was one of the two nodes to first come online (the other was at UCLA). SRI is also where the “Mother of all Demos” came from.
  - usr1106 3y ago
    What was their domain/hostname at the time?
strangeloops85 3y ago
I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally. Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot. The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.
- rchiang 3y ago
  Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole. Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.
  - nickt 3y ago
    Talking of registering domains, xerox.com was the 7th registered .com, and SRI was the 8th - less than a week apart in January 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while I wonder why some corporations don't see the value of R&D, or even "incidental" R&D, when you develop something revolutionary while you work on something profitable.
VagueMag 3y ago
For something of its size and influence very few people have heard of SRI, but it comes up frequently in 'noided online discussions about the overlap between Silicon Valley and military/intelligence. A lot of the things that PARC was credited with creating in the first place were really dreamed up at SRI, so it makes a certain sense for them to be merging: https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/67/#more-67 https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/67/#more-67 https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-monster-is-a-psyop/ https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-...
- rchiang 3y ago
  I think it's important to note that much (all?) of PARCs research has been oriented around the "office of the future". In the broadest sense of that vision, they had a huge hand in originating a lot of computing technologies. And while SRI has had their impact in the computing industry, they also have other research labs that have very little to do with computing such as biomedical, education, and policy.
  - fatneckbeard 3y ago
    sri was never gonna allow a bunch of hippies and bearded longhairs tour their facility in the spirit of academic comradeship. (IE no microsoft, no apple being allowed to walk around and talk to people in the 80s to get the ideas for Macintosh and Windows) Ironically, Apple and Microsoft would never allow some stranger company to walk into their offices and see everything they were developing either. lol
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Xerox had two meetings with Apple, in December 1979. Neither they nor Microsoft was ever able to "walk into their offices and see everything they were developing ."
      - smilespray 3y ago
        Come on. Xerox gave away the crown jewels in those meetings.
eichin 3y ago
PARC and SRI in the news? what is this, 1993? am I going to see a DECWRL announcement next?
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  HP could probably make some cash by reconstitution WRL and spinning it off.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    I wonder if DECWRL's giant megawatt transformer is still entombed under the sidewalk in Palo Alto, and if the daily special includes fried fish, and the rancid grease has returned again. https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html
    - xhkkffbf 3y ago
      One of the great Silicon Valley stories-- before the place got tooo fancy.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  My UUCP mail spool just caught up. I missed the sales at BEST and Service Merchandize, and dammit, I had coupons to redeem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
musicale 3y ago
The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  Oof. Unkind. Hopefully not accurate.
robert-graham 3y ago
Remember that SRI is a patent troll. They are non-practicing entity. They don't build the things they "invent". They instead write patents then extort the people who do build things. I say this from personal experience. I created many inventions in "intrusion detection", spent years in data centers making theory work in practice. SRI sued me using vaguely worded patents. It's a harsh accusation, but objectively true. They never built a commercial intrusion-detection product, but they did sue people.
- mlyle 3y ago
  All academic and research institutes tend to accumulate patents and weaponize them. It's not fair to characterize SRI as a "non-practicing entity". Aside from all the things they build for defense / NSF, they did invent this thing called "Siri" that a lot of people use. > They never built a commercial intrusion-detection product No, but they did give away things like Bothunter away (which is admittedly HIDS). I'm sympathetic to the argument against patents, etc. I was your competitor in the IDS space and also made a very fast IDS and exited, and also was harassed by people without a product in the market (over sending TCP RSTs to close connections, of all things, where there was loads of prior art).
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  "patent troll" -- I hate those as much as you do, but I wouldn't call SRI one. All patents have the broadest language the lawyers could get through the PTO. Wow, do the lawyers over on Reddit hate this! In the Appendix, you can follow the progress of a recent Facebook patent: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/lets-vote-on-it https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/lets-vote-on-it I do tend to be inflammatory at times /s
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  "non-practicing entity" usually means some company that's only formed to sue people, and has no other business. After it's collected the money, it goes out of business, so there are no assets to recover from them. Often their "office" is just a PO box in East Texas. SRI is a real research entity. I know someone who worked there, and he's not a lawyer. That doesn't make them any more admirable, of course.
kepler1 3y ago
Somehow, I see 2 empty campuses merging to sell off their real estate value that is currently worth more than any new intellectual property being produced.
- aoki 3y ago
  The PARC campus is part of Stanford Research Park, so no.
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  Yes. Because employees are clamoring to return to the office.
1letterunixname 3y ago
SRI was Stanford University affiliates' dodge around the school's charter to work to work on MIC projects such as work for DARPA. Not quite RAND but still not saints.
jelliclesfarm 3y ago
SRI completely developed Abundant Robotics..the first apple harvester robot. It was the only one of its kind. But American VCs ..being who they are … do not consider real Ag worthy and let it die. Abundant Robotics went bankrupt and went into liquidation..the last I heard, their IPs sold to a small Chinese led incubator. SRI has its fingers in a lot of pies..including surgical robotics.

257 points by sonoffett 3y ago

Will this mean that PARC will transition towards doing more government funded research? SRI is pretty heavily funded by the government as far as I know.

rchiang 3y ago
The Morningstar article had a few more details that I couldn't find anywhere else: "As part of the donation, Xerox will enter into a preferred research agreement, called the Technology Exploration and Innovation Program, in which SRI will provide contracted research and development services to Xerox and its clients. Through the collaborative program, Xerox and SRI will identify topic areas relevant to Xerox’s core print, digital and IT Services business, with the final goal of creating proofs-of-concept and roadmaps to implementation. Xerox will also retain a branded Innovation Hub at PARC to host meetings, demonstrations and annual conferences for its clients." It's unclear what the size of this revenue stream is compared to SRI's current revenues.
- jameshart 3y ago
  TIL there is an investment oriented news site called https://morningstar.com https://morningstar.com. Was struggling to figure out why the Communist Party of Great Britain’s newspaper (https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/ https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/) would have relevant coverage of this topic. Although I suppose the machinations of the Silicon Valley/US government research establishment have probably been of intense interest to international socialism since the 1960s..
gumby 3y ago
PARC has been doing government funded research from the beginning (ARPA); after they were semi-spun off from Xerox they were primarily funded the same as SRI: government grants and corporate contracting.

usr1106 3y ago

As a software engineer since the 1980s, of course I know (Xerox) PARC. But am I the only one for whom SRI does not ring any bells? I'm confident Wikipedia can tell me more, but if they don't tell in their press release I would claim they might overestimate their "brand".

ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
IIRC basically a Pentagon funded think tank in Silicon Valley, though their best days were really the 1970s and 1980s.
- VagueMag 3y ago
  Yeah SRI was what emerged when military/intelligence related work needed to be separated from Stanford University proper as a result of campus protests in the 60s over the university's involvement in chemical weapons and counterinsurgency research.
  - usr1106 3y ago
    If that is true it gives me the kind of background I was looking for.
- Animats 3y ago
  Yes. I dealt with them a lot in my aerospace days. Boyer and Moore used to work there. I used their theorem prover for early proof of correctness work.
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
SRI was one of the original nodes of the ARPAnet, and was one of the two nodes to first come online (the other was at UCLA). SRI is also where the “Mother of all Demos” came from.
- usr1106 3y ago
  What was their domain/hostname at the time?

strangeloops85 3y ago

I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally. Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot. The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.

rchiang 3y ago
Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole. Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.
- nickt 3y ago
  Talking of registering domains, xerox.com was the 7th registered .com, and SRI was the 8th - less than a week apart in January 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
rbanffy 3y ago
> I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while I wonder why some corporations don't see the value of R&D, or even "incidental" R&D, when you develop something revolutionary while you work on something profitable.

VagueMag 3y ago

For something of its size and influence very few people have heard of SRI, but it comes up frequently in 'noided online discussions about the overlap between Silicon Valley and military/intelligence. A lot of the things that PARC was credited with creating in the first place were really dreamed up at SRI, so it makes a certain sense for them to be merging: https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/67/#more-67 https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/67/#more-67 https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-monster-is-a-psyop/ https://squamuglia.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-...

rchiang 3y ago
I think it's important to note that much (all?) of PARCs research has been oriented around the "office of the future". In the broadest sense of that vision, they had a huge hand in originating a lot of computing technologies. And while SRI has had their impact in the computing industry, they also have other research labs that have very little to do with computing such as biomedical, education, and policy.
- fatneckbeard 3y ago
  sri was never gonna allow a bunch of hippies and bearded longhairs tour their facility in the spirit of academic comradeship. (IE no microsoft, no apple being allowed to walk around and talk to people in the 80s to get the ideas for Macintosh and Windows) Ironically, Apple and Microsoft would never allow some stranger company to walk into their offices and see everything they were developing either. lol
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Xerox had two meetings with Apple, in December 1979. Neither they nor Microsoft was ever able to "walk into their offices and see everything they were developing ."
    - smilespray 3y ago
      Come on. Xerox gave away the crown jewels in those meetings.

eichin 3y ago

PARC and SRI in the news? what is this, 1993? am I going to see a DECWRL announcement next?

retrocryptid 3y ago
HP could probably make some cash by reconstitution WRL and spinning it off.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  I wonder if DECWRL's giant megawatt transformer is still entombed under the sidewalk in Palo Alto, and if the daily special includes fried fish, and the rancid grease has returned again. https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    One of the great Silicon Valley stories-- before the place got tooo fancy.
1letterunixname 3y ago
My UUCP mail spool just caught up. I missed the sales at BEST and Service Merchandize, and dammit, I had coupons to redeem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

musicale 3y ago

The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

retrocryptid 3y ago
Oof. Unkind. Hopefully not accurate.

robert-graham 3y ago

Remember that SRI is a patent troll. They are non-practicing entity. They don't build the things they "invent". They instead write patents then extort the people who do build things. I say this from personal experience. I created many inventions in "intrusion detection", spent years in data centers making theory work in practice. SRI sued me using vaguely worded patents. It's a harsh accusation, but objectively true. They never built a commercial intrusion-detection product, but they did sue people.

mlyle 3y ago
All academic and research institutes tend to accumulate patents and weaponize them. It's not fair to characterize SRI as a "non-practicing entity". Aside from all the things they build for defense / NSF, they did invent this thing called "Siri" that a lot of people use. > They never built a commercial intrusion-detection product No, but they did give away things like Bothunter away (which is admittedly HIDS). I'm sympathetic to the argument against patents, etc. I was your competitor in the IDS space and also made a very fast IDS and exited, and also was harassed by people without a product in the market (over sending TCP RSTs to close connections, of all things, where there was loads of prior art).
AlbertCory 3y ago
"patent troll" -- I hate those as much as you do, but I wouldn't call SRI one. All patents have the broadest language the lawyers could get through the PTO. Wow, do the lawyers over on Reddit hate this! In the Appendix, you can follow the progress of a recent Facebook patent: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/lets-vote-on-it https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/lets-vote-on-it I do tend to be inflammatory at times /s
AlbertCory 3y ago
"non-practicing entity" usually means some company that's only formed to sue people, and has no other business. After it's collected the money, it goes out of business, so there are no assets to recover from them. Often their "office" is just a PO box in East Texas. SRI is a real research entity. I know someone who worked there, and he's not a lawyer. That doesn't make them any more admirable, of course.

kepler1 3y ago

Somehow, I see 2 empty campuses merging to sell off their real estate value that is currently worth more than any new intellectual property being produced.

aoki 3y ago
The PARC campus is part of Stanford Research Park, so no.
retrocryptid 3y ago
Yes. Because employees are clamoring to return to the office.

1letterunixname 3y ago

SRI was Stanford University affiliates' dodge around the school's charter to work to work on MIC projects such as work for DARPA. Not quite RAND but still not saints.

jelliclesfarm 3y ago

SRI completely developed Abundant Robotics..the first apple harvester robot. It was the only one of its kind. But American VCs ..being who they are … do not consider real Ag worthy and let it die. Abundant Robotics went bankrupt and went into liquidation..the last I heard, their IPs sold to a small Chinese led incubator. SRI has its fingers in a lot of pies..including surgical robotics.