[HN Gopher] The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI I...
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The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Will Join SRI International
Author : sonoffett
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-04-24 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sri.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sri.com)
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| IIRC basically a Pentagon funded think tank in Silicon Valley,
| though their best days were really the 1970s and 1980s.
| VagueMag wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If that is true it gives me the kind of background I was
| looking for.
| Animats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What was their domain/hostname at the time?
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| "SRI" [1]
|
| [1] https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/
| 63774...
| eichin wrote:
| 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.)
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Hmm, an SDS 940. Never heard :(
|
| I have used a CDC 6600 and various 370s. PDP only from
| reading, I started with VAXen.
| jeron wrote:
| 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
| drfuchs wrote:
| But, just as with IBM and NCR, "SRI" is now just a 3-letter
| non-acronym, that officially doesn't stand for anything.
| usr1106 wrote:
| anymore, you mean. Knowing history is good and so are
| mnemonics.
| drewda wrote:
| 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)
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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_
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| fmajid wrote:
| 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
| jldugger wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| drewda wrote:
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| rchiang wrote:
| 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).
| carom wrote:
| I've teamed with SRI before. They're well known in the defense
| research space.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Ever heard of Siri?
|
| It was an SRI spinout, acquired by Apple in 2010.
| https://www.sri.com/hoi/siri/
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| rchiang wrote:
| 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...
| jldugger wrote:
| > 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 =)
| robbiet480 wrote:
| SRI was instrumental in the creation of Disneyland
| https://www.sri.com/hoi/disneyland/
| VagueMag wrote:
| 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-...
| rchiang wrote:
| 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.
| eichin wrote:
| PARC and SRI in the news? what is this, 1993? am I going to see a
| DECWRL announcement next?
| musicale wrote:
| The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.
| osnium123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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..
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-04-24 23:00 UTC)