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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 t
by usr1106 4y 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 4y agoIIRC basically a Pentagon funded think tank in Silicon Valley, though their best days were really the 1970s and 1980s.
- VagueMag 4y agoYeah 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 4y agoIf that is true it gives me the kind of background I was looking for.
- Animats 4y agoYes. 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 4y agoSRI 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 4y agoWhat was their domain/hostname at the time?
- ricktdotorg 4y ago"SRI" [1] [1] https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/637740C2-B0AF-4005-9F8792CADB04C376_source.jpg https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/63774...
- usr1106 4y agoProbably I knew that decades ago, faint memories come up when I read it. Not having heard SRI ever since, I had completey forgotten that.
- usr1106 4y agoHmm, an SDS 940. Never heard :( I have used a CDC 6600 and various 370s. PDP only from reading, I started with VAXen.
- retrocryptid 4y agoYeah. SDS (later XDS) was bought up by Xerox just before Xerox launched PARC. In the "Fumbling the Future" book, there's several pages describing how PARC has to constantly push back against corporate who were trying to fold it (PARC) into SDS. I wrote my first Lisp program on a 940 back in the 70s. IIRC, the Sigma series were the machines XDS built after the 940. I don't know they were super popular, but maybe you might have heard of them.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThere is actually a book which you can get for free (or could, at one time): https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Nobody-Wanted-Years-Xerox/dp/1427632707/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Nobody-Wanted-Years-Xerox/d... we can call it "the book nobody wanted." /s Strassman tells how he offered the PARC people a very good deal on an SDS machine, and they turned up their noses at it. They wanted a PDP-10, but they weren't allowed to buy from DEC, so they built their own lookalike (Maxc).
- jeron 4y agoSRI is Stanford Research Institute, which was established by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946 [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International
- drfuchs 4y agoBut, just as with IBM and NCR, “SRI” is now just a 3-letter non-acronym, that officially doesn’t stand for anything.
- usr1106 4y agoanymore, you mean. Knowing history is good and so are mnemonics.
- drfuchs 4y agoMy “is now” indeed means “was, but no longer is.” So, no SNAFU; it’s OK.
- drewda 4y agoAnother example: What used to be called the Stanford Linear Accelerator is now officially just "SLAC" (as the university holds trademark for "Stanford" and didn't want to share with the US Department of Energy)
- retrocryptid 4y agoIn the old days we used to call community colleges "Junior Colleges." The first time I came out to the valley I noticed a university there called "Leland Stanford Junior University" and assumed it must be a Junior College associated with Stanford University. So yes, they need all the help they can get with naming things.
- kjs3 4y agoShame...National Cash Register had so much character. Like the similarly depreciated American Telephone & Telegraph.
- dekhn 4y agoDouglas Englebart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos) worked there in the 60s. They were one of the very first sites on the Internet. Lots of highly technical research has been done there over the decades.
- drewda 4y agoIf you don't know the acronym SRI, then you probably aren't likely their target customer :) The S used to stand for Stanford. Just like RAND or Battelle or a half dozen others, it's nominally a non-profit organization that manages huge R&D projects, employs thousands of scientists and engineers, and manages government research facilities.
- usr1106 4y agoNot personally, you have a point :) I have used Ethernet since 1985ish without being PARC's customer either. I have used a mouse since 1987ish. If you had asked me before reading up on the topic minutes ago where the mouse was developed I would have probably answered PARC, too, and not Stanford and absolutely not SRI. Not sure how the former managed to build to build a "brand" for stuff they haven't even accomplished.
- rchiang 4y agoIt's a fine distinction that maybe computer historians know best. Doug Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" showed off the first computer mouse. The computer mouse that shipped with the Xerox Star is credited as being the "first commercially available computer mouse". Along similar lines, while the original Ethernet was invented at PARC, Ethernet gained more popularity in industry through Silicon Valley companies like 3Com (with founder Bob Metcalfe, recent ACM Turing Award winner and ex-PARC researcher) and SynOptics Communications (with founders Andrew Ludwick and Ronald Schmidt, both ex-PARC employees).
- kjs3 4y agoBecause SRI focused on gov/mil/intel projects, and Xerox shipped commercial products? There are lots of places like SRI you've never heard of unless you come from their world (e.g. RAND, General Atomics, etc.).
- retrocryptid 4y agoTechnically it was at the ARC (Augmentation Research Center), but the ARC was at SRI.
- carom 4y agoI've teamed with SRI before. They're well known in the defense research space.
- tverbeure 4y agoEver heard of Siri? It was an SRI spinout, acquired by Apple in 2010. https://www.sri.com/hoi/siri/ https://www.sri.com/hoi/siri/
- usr1106 4y agoThat's what Wikipedia tells. I had no clue where it came from. Of course it's not unheard of the big companies like Apple buy their best ideas from elsewhere.
- rchiang 4y agoThis article gives a bit of context about Siri's history with SRI International: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bringing-siri-to-life https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...
- jldugger 4y ago> I had no clue where it came from. Siri started life running on Android and iOS. They took it down when Apple bought the company two months after launching. So if you blinked you might have missed it =)
- retrocryptid 4y agoI think the android bits and some of the staff formed Kuato after Apple bought Siri. I interviewed for a gig there back in the day, but I landed at Linden Lab instead.
- robbiet480 4y agoSRI was instrumental in the creation of Disneyland https://www.sri.com/hoi/disneyland/ https://www.sri.com/hoi/disneyland/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fmajid 4y agoHave you heard of Doug Engelbart and his Mother of All Demos? That was at SRI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
- retrocryptid 4y agoYes. Yes I have.
- jldugger 4y agoSRI is like, the secret bit of stanford where the faculty only do research and no teaching. It's where Siri and Nuance came from, and two staffers who worked there in the 50s quit to found FairIssac. Most notably for the HN crowd, its where Englebart worked on his Mother of All Demos, and where LaTeX was written.
- musicale 4y agoSRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) split from Stanford University in 1970. Students (et al.) had protested SRI's participation in secret (and military) research projects, and Stanford ultimately determined that secret research was incompatible with the university's mission. Of course, like many universities, Stanford has aligned its actual priorities to focus primarily on endowment expansion and administrative employment.
- sundarurfriend 4y ago> FairIssac TIL that FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corporation (or Fair, Isaac and Company, originally).
- iancmceachern 4y agoAnd Intuitive's Da Vinci: https://www.sri.com/hoi/telerobotic-surgery/ https://www.sri.com/hoi/telerobotic-surgery/
- gumby 4y agoSRI is where Doug Engelbart worked developed the mouse and windowing interface (among other things) and put together the "Mother of all Demos". SRI where the original ARPANET NIC was, and had various important roles in the development of the net. I really don't think they overestimated their brand, they just talk to their likely customers. (I worked at PARC, never at SRI, but I had many friends from SRI, and there was a flow of personnel in both directions).
- DonHopkins 4y agoSRI-NIC was the center of the universe. All ARPANET TIPs/TACs had a special purpose command "@N" that would connect directly to the NIC's Tops-20 PDP-10 at SRI, where you could get news about the network status, communicate with the people running the net, and stuff like that.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago- Mouse, of course - Magnetic check ink - ERMA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Recording_Machine,_Accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Recording_Machine,_... More importantly: Stanford, SRI, and the high signal of connected people in Palo Alto created lots of inventions and companies. Sports metaphor: when they're on the team, the team scores more indirectly by their presence. Palo Alto-Stanford has been a modern "Venice" in terms of center of business-meets-academic since about 1940. Boston owns it in academia in sheer numbers of campuses and of reputation, but not when it comes to tightening the iteration loops of making money.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoBoston used to have a viable computer industry but it's all largely faded away with the minicomputers. Oh well. They've got the drug business now.
- jhbadger 4y agoAnd in the 1980s and 1990s Boston used to have a great computer museum, but that closed in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston
- MaysonL 4y agoBack in the ‘700s I was blown away reading some of Doug Engelbart’s research reports hot off the CopyFlo®. See “The Mother of All Demos” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos