World-Changing Innovations from SRI International.
SRI International is an independent, nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, foundations, and other organizations. SRI also brings its innovations to the marketplace by licensing its intellectual property and creating new ventures. SRI was founded as Stanford Research Institute in 1946 by a group of West Coast industrialists and Stanford University. SRI formally separated from the University in 1970, and we changed our name to SRI International in 1977.
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and his team at SRI created many of the concepts and tools that set the global computer revolution in motion.
The first computer mouse was one of many breakthrough innovations originating at SRI. Engelbart conceived of the mouse in the early 1960s while exploring the interactions between humans and computers. Bill English, then the chief engineer at SRI, built the first prototype in 1964. A replica of the original computer mouse—a carved block of wood with a single red button — is on display in the lobby of SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. Designs with multiple buttons soon followed. A single wheel or a pair of wheels was used to translate the motion of the mouse into cursor movement on the screen. Engelbart was the inventor on the basic patent for what was then called the “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System.” The patent was filed in 1967 and issued in 1970. (see patent #3,541,541)
For Engelbart, the mouse was one part of a much larger technological system whose purpose was to facilitate organizational learning and global online collaboration.
When Engelbart was a graduate student in electrical engineering, he began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes, and he dreamed of “flying” through a variety of information spaces. In early 1959, he pursued his visionary ideas further into the formulation of a theoretical framework for the co-evolution of human skills, knowledge, and organizations. At the heart of his vision was the computer as an extension of human communication capabilities and a resource for the augmentation of human intellect.
By 1968, Engelbart had formed and was directing SRI’s Augmentation Research Center. With this group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers, he staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing when a computer mouse controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing.
It changed what is possible. The 1968 event, which has been called the “mother of all demos”, presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking. The demo embodied Engelbart’s vision of solving humanity’s most important problems by using computers to improve communication and collaboration.
One of The latest inovations by SRI was Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Mobile Devices 2010 SRI spin-off company Siri, acquired by Apple in 2010, offers the first virtual personal assistant for the iPhone®.
