Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to join SRI International | Hacker News Reader

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to join SRI International

sri.com

257 pointssonoffett118 comments

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/2017/04/22/yes-kids-cookie-...

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.

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

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 ."

Come on. Xerox gave away the crown jewels in those meetings.

Xerox was paid for the crown jewels and according to Larry Tesler, it didn't take any arm-twisting to get him to move to Apple as Xerox was dragging their feet commercializing PARC's innovations.

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

"It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong."

Full details at https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

and there are many other references on the Web about that visit.

yeah well my original point still stands.

"PARC was not at all secretive about its work. Its researchers published widely, and there was a regular flow of traffic between PARC and Stanford's computer science community. "

as opposed to a military intelligence company where all that would get you fired if not in prison.

I don't know what you're quoting. I was there, though.

I can't recall the female scientist's name, but I am certain have read an 'oral history' where this specific person, present when Apple people show up, angrily calls up Xerox HQ in east coast to protest and was told, over the phone, to "show them everything".

I don't know which specific oral history, but you're most likely referring to Adele Goldberg. She's mentioned several times that she protested showing Steve Jobs their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scien...

Yes that's her, thank you.

She was at the Computer History Museum 50th anniversary of Smalltalk event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loEREmEPEOY

This one is different from the other source I recall. It could have been someone else's oral history and she was mentioned. This is what she says in her own OH:

-- [emph added: p.12 of https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...] --

"When Stewart Brand came into PARC and there was a book Cybernetics 2? [II cybernetic frontiers], half of it was about the "secret" company and Stewart had pictures of PARC and so there had been publicity that I guess hadn’t been properly signed off on. And so there had been a bit of a “You don’t get to publish for awhile” period. I think Alan took it too seriously. He didn’t like having his hand slapped. We did start publishing again more in the ’76 timeframe including the personal dynamic media paper that Alan and I did for IEEE Computer Software. I wanted to go to corporate and ask for permission and it was a little risky because you didn’t know what would come back. There’s no reason for them to say yes.

Lucky for me, between the time I suggested it and actually asking, Xerox’s venture group had bought a lot of equity in a little fledgling computer company that wasn’t doing very well called Apple Computer and they had arranged for the Apple executives and then later the Lisa programming team, to come for a visit.

I kind of parlayed that into, “Well you’re willing to give it away. You’re not interested.” And I wrote this motivator about why we should be able to publish it all because we were planning to write a book and we were planning to have this community implementation event. I think it went to one of the principals at the venture group who then asked Jeff Rulifson his opinion. Jeff was on some special leave from PARC to corporate and he wrote “Oh sure, publish all this”. So I had it [the permission] on paper."

-- end --

I don't recall hearing about this Xerox venture group and its "lot of equity" in Apple. But ..

- source: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/corporate-venture... --

"Xerox had had an active CVC program since the 1960s, operating an internally managed fund that invested in some of the most legendary figures in Silicon Valley, including Raymond Kurzweil and Steve Jobs. Kurzweil got his start in technology when Xerox invested in his first company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc., in 1982, to develop a computer that could transcribe spoken English. The idea behind the investment was to create technology that would increase demand for Xerox’s printing products when it ultimately hit the market.

When Apple released its revolutionary Macintosh computer, some observers claimed that it had commercialized technologies first developed at Xerox PARC, such as the mouse, windows, and icons, even dating the origin of the supposed copying to a 1979 visit to the lab by Jobs and other Apple employees — the tour is considered a seminal event in Silicon Valley lore. Although the accusation that Apple outright copied its ideas for user interface from Xerox is generally refuted today, the revelations stung Xerox’s management. The company was eventually spurred into rethinking its CVC program in an effort to better capitalize on the company’s languishing in-house technologies."

-- end --

re the CVC program: I wrote about that extensively in here:

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

they did "capitalize" on their technology in the 80's and 90's, mainly by allowing entrepreneurs a license to build with it (with no money put in).

Thanks for the interesting link. Who knew about Beretta? TIL!

You're welcome. Like I said, "800 years of making weapons" seems to be a myth.

I did some podcast interviews, and one host said he's talked to three people who were at the Apple meetings, and all three stories were different.

Defense research publishes a lot of science too.

That first link was a fascinating read. I guess you wrote books about it?

Thanks!

Inventing the Future forbids any hindsight. No one knows how it will turn out.

Hence the title: what if we DO allow hindsight?

Xerox received Apple stock for those meetings which they sold in the IPO. I’ve never seen anyone do a calculation of the present value of that stock but it’s probably a significant fraction of Xerox’s market cap today.

I'm pretty sure it was sold a long time ago.

However, in here: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

I calculate some of the other PARC spinoffs they did. If they'd held onto all of it, it would dwarf the value of the copier & printer business.

Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.

It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.

Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.

Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.

Yeah, I've been in touch with Dr. Chesborough and I went over some of his stuff in writing this:

https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

Butler Lampson quoted some Xerox executive at the time as saying, "We don't want to be a holding company!"

Nonetheless. Damn, WHAT a holding company!

Thanks, interesting read. I guess the decision to sell all of those 100,00 shares at the Apple IPO was a pretty expensive blunder.

By the time apple was founded, many (most) of the people doing research that would be of interest to Jobs had already moved over to PARC. Larry Tesler springs immediately to mind, but Thierry Bardini's book on Engelbart has a more complete list. After the ARC fell apart in 1970, PARC was launching and was a natural place for them to land.

Most people have heard of Siri though that was named after SRI!

No it wasn't. https://www.gottabemobile.com/why-siri-is-called-siri/

Huh not sure where I read this long time ago, but yeah it appears to only have a vague connection to SRI at best.

Here’s the president of SRI saying it was a pure coincidence: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...

Here’s the cofounder saying that at least some of the appeal of the name was that some people liked the resemblance to SRI: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/12/21/how-did-siri-g...

When I hear SRI, I always think of the parapsychology research they did for 20 or so years from ~1970-1990 and their huge clash with the newly founded skeptical organization CSICOP (now CSI) in the late 70's.

Yeah, I wonder how much money they milked out of the DoD on remote viewing and stuff like that.

Ultimate respect to anyone who manages to be paid by the DoD to get high on LSD.

My favorite explanation for the remote viewing stuff is that it was cover for advanced spy satellite imagery and transmission. Explaining away new capabilities you want to keep unknown to the world as "magic." https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1371213766734573569?t=lrW...

The other theory I've encountered is that it was cover for ongoing mind control research after MKULTRA had to be wound down.

Interesting...

Much of the Research leading up to the DaVinci Surgical Robot as is known today was in fact under SRI's umbrella, originally with the purpose of having battle field hospitals with remote surgery teleoperation.

Another great example of the overlap between Silicon Valley and military/intelligence. It's disconcerting how great tech for the masses is often spun out of a warfare motivation.

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.

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.

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_r...

> 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.

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

HP could probably make some cash by reconstitution WRL and spinning it off.

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

One of the great Silicon Valley stories-- before the place got tooo fancy.

My UUCP mail spool just caught up. I missed the sales at BEST and Service Merchandize, and dammit, I had coupons to redeem.

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.

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.

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.

TIL there is an investment oriented news site called https://morningstar.com. Was struggling to figure out why the Communist Party of Great Britain’s newspaper (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..

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.

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".

IIRC basically a Pentagon funded think tank in Silicon Valley, though their best days were really the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

If that is true it gives me the kind of background I was looking for.

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.

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.

What was their domain/hostname at the time?

"SRI" [1]

[1] https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/63774...

Probably I knew that decades ago, faint memories come up when I read it. Not having heard SRI ever since, I had completey forgotten that.

Hmm, an SDS 940. Never heard :(

I have used a CDC 6600 and various 370s. PDP only from reading, I started with VAXen.

Yeah. 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.

There is actually a book which you can get for free (or could, at one time):

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).

The one people will remember, though, is SRI-NIC because that's where you FTP'ed the offical HOSTS.TXT file from (mid-to-late 1980s before DNS.)

I dunno where you were at, but as a student admin at another major ARPAnet/NSFnet site we were using DNS on everything worth the admin time to configure it by 85/86 and noone was regularly FTP'ing HOSTS.TXT unless they had to (e.g. our BITNET connected machines had an IP gateway, but no DNS software for IBM VM/CMS and for a while).

I was vague about the years to avoid having to do too much research for mere nostalgia, but there was a transition in there from "just MIT-MULTICS and MIT-ATHENA" to "MIT-MULTICS.ARPA" and then eventually having .EDU names as well. (The same sort of nostalgia that leads me to use 10/8 for home and office nets just so I can put some interesting machine on 10.0.0.6.) (And it turns out searching for "10.0.0.6 imp 6" (multics was imp 6 port 0) turns up https://www.google.com/books/edition/ARPANET_Directory/M6opA... in the "in 1982 information was in books" department...)

oh man your comment just made me remember that i registered a domain by also FTPing a txt file to some NIC FTP site, i'm guessing it was 1991?.

IIRC that's when i registered rmt.org (my initials) using that method (for free!). used it for a couple of years but then moved to USA and at some point in the mid 90s i guess i had to start paying for it, i forgot -- and lost the domain to the UK union for Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. a worthy successor!

well i guess they sold it because now the domain is owned by a trust that helps autistic children in the UK. another worthy successor!

anyway, thanks for the memory!!!

Note: if you sold each IPV4 address of a /8 block for the cut-rate bulk price of $1 each today, it would be worth $2^24 = $16,777,216.00.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379919

DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

I know a naughty person who decades ago hijacked a /8 IPV4 network block when the company that owned it went out of business, by registering their expired domain name and sending in an email from that domain, transferring ownership of the block to himself.

It was "hot" so he couldn't just squat on it or sell it in the open, but he laundered it by trading it to some shady company in exchange for free network services for life.

If I were him, I would have printed out all the addresses on little slips of paper and taken an "IPV4 Address Bath" like Huell's scene in Breaking Bad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HrmD_vIMIk

>(sexy lip bite) ... "I gotta do it, man!" ... "Mexico, all's I'm sayin'!"

icedchai on Feb 17, 2022 [–]

Was it really an /8? I could believe a smaller block...

DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?

Yep, it was a long time ago, and he was one of those "old net boys" who worked on the early ARPANET, but I won't say anything else that might identify him.

I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card.

So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was named "DEVON", while most other accounts like mine were something ugly like "DH32", using initials and numbers. One day his boss summoned him to his office and showed him a print-out of the TACACS accounts, with "DEVON" right at the top, and asked him who the hell that was. He sheepishly prevaricated that "DEVON" was actually a control code to turn the printer DEVice ON, which accidentally got printed at the beginning of the list because of a bug in his program missing an escape code, and he would fix it right away. And that's how Devon lost his TAC card. We still tease him about his name as a printer control code, and call him "DEVOFF" when he talks too much. I'm pretty sure his boss knew what was up, but just let it slide.

Network security was a lot different in those days. TAC cards only happened later when they finally put passwords on the dialup TACs/TIPs -- you originally could dial up and connect to any host on the ARPANET without a password, then you could ask nicely for a free tourist account at places like the MIT-AI Lab. It didn't even require any social engineering, just being polite and curious, reading documentation, and following instructions.

I asked BBN nicely about the TIP manual, and they helpfully mailed me a free hardcopy of the "Users Guide for the Terminal IMP", which documented how to take control of other people's sessions and even divert their output by prefixing @ commands by their terminal number! See "Section 5: Unusual uses of the TIP" page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters" and "The DIVERT OUTPUT Command":

https://usermanual.wiki/Document/ADA014398UsersGuidetotheTer...

The guy who originally wrote that TIP manual in 1971 was none other than Will Crowther, who also developed Colossal Cave Adventure with Don Woods! You're in a twisty little maze of IMPs, all different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crowther_(programmer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986): This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986. The ARPANET is history now, but thanks to the magic of Pseudo-Scientific Visualization and the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs, you can now experience what it was like to be free ranging packet hopping around the ARPANET in 1986!

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/arpanet/index-large....

MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73...

“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221

Keith F. Lynch wrote up a fascinatingly detailed and accurate history of the ARPANET from his perspective:

http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html

Keith mentions that ARPANET TACACS passwords were installed in 1986, and even mentions how Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET for being obnoxious in 1985, which I can conform with the email messages he mentioned. The first message is about TACACS, and explains how MILNET TACACS was implemented in 1984, before ARPANET TACACS (in 1986). It was addressed to the same DEVON, and HN's own GUMBY chimed in with some salty remarks:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/pourne-smut.htm...

jacquesm on Feb 17, 2022 | root | parent [–]

Your text is garbled:

"then you could even anity TACACS account "

DonHopkins on Feb 18, 2022 | root | parent [–]

Thanks, fixed! The "Arpanet" episode of The Americans featured a classic scene with an academic computer science professor dude bullshitting about the ARPANET -- I'm sure we both know somebody exactly like that from that period, who made eloquent hand-waving metaphors about Virtual Spaces and Post Offices and God and Disembodied Brains, trying to explain to skeptical people how vast and important the ARPANET was (with its 8 enormous bits of address space). But he kinda had a point, calling the PDP-10 "The Beast".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0

But the thing The Americans "Arpanet" episode got wrong is that you didn't actually have to slap on a Frank Zappa Soul Patch and a Beatnik Wig, dress up like a janitor, and brutally murder an unlucky grad student to get on the ARPANET, you just had to ask the right people nicely! (But it's still one of the best episodes, with the scene about passing a lie detector test by clenching your anus.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)

It looks like SRI's network address was "2".

At that time, NCP network addresses were just 8 bits, and homosocketuality was illegal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178993

DonHopkins on April 23, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: How SSH got port number 22

Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol [1], before the full duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were required to use sockets with different parity gender (one even and the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it even mattered -- they just had to be different).

The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was considered a "peculiar error" called "homosocketuality", which was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita Bryant feature" [2].

http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC[SS,SYS]

When the error code is zero, the next 8 bit byte is the Stanford peculiar error code, followed by 72 bits of the ailing command returned. Here are the Stanford error codes. [...]

IGN 3 Illegal Gender (Anita Bryant feature--sockets must be heterosocketual, ie. odd to even and even to odd) [...]

Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0

The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality. Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we naturally refuse to consent to it.

http://www.saildart.org/FTP.NCP[S,NET]

    ; Try to initiate connection

    loginj:
            init log,17
            sixbit /IMP/
            0
            jrst noinit
            setzm conecb
            setom conecb+lsloc
            move ac3,hostno
            movem ac3,conecb+hloc
            setom conecb+wfloc
            movei ac3,40
            movem ac3,conecb+bsloc
            move ac3,consck
            trnn ac3,1
                jrst gayskt  ; only heterosocketuals can win!
             movem ac3,conecb+fsloc
             mtape log,[
                     =15
                     byte (6) 2,24,0,7,7
                     ]       ; Time out CLS, RFNM, RFC, and INPut

    [...]

    gayskt:    outstr [asciz/Homosocketuality is prohibited (the Anita Bryant feature)

    /]

        ife rsexec,<jrst rstart;>exit       1,

(The PDP-10 code above adds the connect and listen socket numbers together, which results in bit 0 being 0 if they are the same gender, then TRNN is "test bits right, no change, skip if non zero", which skips the next instruction (jrst gayskt) if they different sex.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-A2Ql81WTY

TMoAD was before DNS (and IP, for that matter.)

SRI is Stanford Research Institute, which was established by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946 [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International

But, just as with IBM and NCR, “SRI” is now just a 3-letter non-acronym, that officially doesn’t stand for anything.

anymore, you mean. Knowing history is good and so are mnemonics.

My “is now” indeed means “was, but no longer is.” So, no SNAFU; it’s OK.

Another 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)

In 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.

Shame...National Cash Register had so much character. Like the similarly depreciated American Telephone & Telegraph.

I'm reminded how anyone with industrial capacity during war2 was pressed into service making weapons. If you look hard enough, you can find M1 Carbines with IBM and NPR (National Post Register) head-stamps.

They made quite a few of them; the interwebs say something like 365K. I know a guy with 2 IBM manufactured M1s. Even cooler, the Rock-Ola juke box company made M1s.

I once worked for Digital Switch Corporation, which was well known as DSC. Sometime in the 80s or early 90s they changed their name to DSC Communication Corporation, or DSCCC. If you expanded it all out, you got "Digital Switch Corporation Communication Corporation," the corporation so corporate, they named it twice.

Does SRI still stand for "Stanford Research Institute"? I thought it was just an acronym since it separated from the university, as described in your wikipedia link:

> SRI formally separated from Stanford University in 1970 and became known as SRI International in 1977

As predicted I found the information myself in Wikipedia. Of course everbody knows Stanford, although I couldn't tell the difference between the university and the research institute. As an IT person (Xerox) PARC remains the iconic one, even if it was a business failure for Xerox.

Douglas Englebart (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.

If 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.

Not 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.

It'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).

Because 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.).

Technically it was at the ARC (Augmentation Research Center), but the ARC was at SRI.

I've teamed with SRI before. They're well known in the defense research space.

Ever heard of Siri?

It was an SRI spinout, acquired by Apple in 2010. https://www.sri.com/hoi/siri/

That'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.

This article gives a bit of context about Siri's history with SRI International: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...

> 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 =)

I 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.

SRI was instrumental in the creation of Disneyland https://www.sri.com/hoi/disneyland/

Have 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

Yes. Yes I have.

SRI 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.

SRI (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.

> FairIssac

TIL that FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corporation (or Fair, Isaac and Company, originally).

And Intuitive's Da Vinci:

https://www.sri.com/hoi/telerobotic-surgery/

SRI 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).

- Mouse, of course

- Magnetic check ink

- ERMA 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.

Boston 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.

And 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

SRI-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.

Also Surgical Robotics and Intuitive's Da Vinci:

https://www.sri.com/hoi/telerobotic-surgery/

Back 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

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.

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.

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).

"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

I do tend to be inflammatory at times /s

"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.

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.

The PARC campus is part of Stanford Research Park, so no.

Yes. Because employees are clamoring to return to the office.

The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

Oof. Unkind. Hopefully not accurate.

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