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SRI: passive pioneer of computerby R.Colin Johnson The "S" in SRI International could very well stand for "seminal." Half a century ago, SRI laid the groundwork for computers as we know them today. Indeed, a strong argument could be made for naming not IBM or Digital or Xerox Parc, but SRI as the company most responsible for pioneering the computer.From the time of the first digital computer, SRI has continually reinvented and downsized the computer from mainframe to minicomputer to PC to laptop to palmtop. Today, SRI is providing the infrastructure for downsizing the computer to the vanishing point-by embedding network-centric smarts inside information appliances, thereby eliminating the general-purpose computer. SRI's path as a computer pioneer began in 1946, when Eniac, the world's first digital computer, was installed at the newly launched company. SRI immediately improved upon that computer, shrinking it by using the world's first magnetic core memory. What followed was a string of firsts as SRI used innovative technology to reinvent the computer-again and again. From the world's first PC-including a computer mouse, the world's first electronic "pen," the world's first windows, menus and icons — SRI then created the world's first optical storage media, then the world's first acoustically coupled modem for "portable" computers, then the world's first liquid-crystal display (LCD) for laptop computers, then the world's first autonomous agents and a proposed standard for information exchange among the smart appliances of the future. From the beginning SRI set a futuristic charter: explore strange new technologies to promote peace and prosperity. The "peace" part has netted SRI billions (about half of its $500 million annual income comes from defense contracts), but the "prosperity" part has earned SRI engineers — who represent almost 70 percent of SRI's 2,700 employees — the title "reinventors of the computer." SRI's charter lists it as a nonprofit scientific research institute with wholly owned subsidiaries, specifically Sarnoff Corp. (formerly RCA Laboratories) and SRI Consulting, to do for-profit work. SRI itself began as Stanford Research Institute, but legally separated from Stanford University in 1970 under IRS Section 501(c)(3). Today, SRI consists of separate business groups, each with its own research area running parallel with the other groups. The flagship Information Science and Software Development (ISSD) group incorporates smart technologies, such as artificial intelligence, speech recognition and virtual reality, into the next generation of embedded information appliances. In parallel, the Automation and Robotics group (AR) is applying artificial intelligence to robotics, systems for automation and software agents that will carry out the bidding of the networked information appliances of the future. Supporting both ISSD and AR is SRI's Sensors and Measurement Systems group, which is creating the next generation of sensors, including innovative electromagnetics, optical, infrared and laser-based technologies. And when new materials are required, SRI does its own basic science research in its Chemicals, Energy and Materials group. This research in materials and processes lead to new applications, such as new types of sensors, using polymers, electrochemistry, advanced inorganic materials, optical materials and molecular physics. SRI also has biologically oriented research groups studying organic materials with applications in both pharmaceutical and medical devices. These groups investigate biological problems as diverse as the inner workings of the neural networks of the brain and discovering a cure for cancer. SRI's continual reinvention of the computer began in 1946 when the world's first digital computer-the 30-ton vacuum tube-based Eniac-was installed at SRI. The company quickly set about refining that monster by downsizing its tons of vacuum-tube memory circuits into nonvolatile magnetic "cores." The magnetic core memory was invented by Hew Crane at Sarnoff (then RCA) and developed after he joined SRI in 1956. Crane was familiar with the magnetic character recognition that SRI had previously invented to read the numbers on the bottom of checks. By 1959 Crane had made his first public presentations of magnetic core memories, and in 1961 SRI demonstrated the world's first all-magnetic core computer. AMP Inc. commercialized SRI's magnetic core memory technology, which endured over a decade until EPROMs replaced it. In the 1960s Crane's ideas percolated within SRI as it rushed to downsize the minicomputer into pint-sized boxes that everyone who bought one of those newfangled TVs could afford — the seminal PC.
SRI's vision of the PC was not realized for more than a decade and even then did not fully embody SRI's original concept. For instance, SRI's prototype mouse was much more elaborate than the simple pointing device used today, involving a "chording" concept whereby more than one button at a time could be pushed to encode various functions. Nevertheless, SRI's original research stimulated a decade of worldwide development that eventually spawned the PC as we know it today. SRI also midwifed the computer's transformation into a laptop in the 1970s, even before the PC idea had fully taken root. First SRI developed the original acoustic coupler patent for traveling modem users, then created the world's first optical disks and read-write optical storage media, which eventually led to CD-ROMs and rewritable optical disks. Meanwhile, researchers over at Sarnoff had invented the first liquid-crystal display (LCD) in the 1960s. When the LCD was combined with SRI's downsized optical memories and GUIs, the PC could be shoehorned into the ever-shrinking laptop we know today. SRI also pioneered the move from laptop to palmtop in the late 1970s, before IBM had announced its first PC. Crane's experiments with electronic pen input devices had produced the foundation for GUIs, including direct computer input of pictographic characters by choosing icons. However, Crane had also demonstrated real-time signature verification and "pen-centric" computing — that is, computers that rely on a pen instead of a keyboard as the major input device. It took another decade of development and the unprecedented success of the PC before SRI invented the world's first pen-centric software, which added pens to PCs as an alternative to the existing keyboard. SRI's vision of pen-centric computing eventually became a reality, but not on the PC — rather, it hit the market as the now familiar palm-size platforms we know today. Reinventing the computer Beyond today's palmtops, SRI is reinventing the computer again, this time with virtual-reality-oriented user interfaces that allow specialists to control smart application-specific devices with high degrees of precision. For instance, SRI is developing smart telepresence surgical devices that promise to put highly skilled surgeons online worldwide to perform surgery remotely. And smart software is carving out a niche for itself, weighing in with as much clout as smart hardware when it comes to reinventing the computer. SRI got an early start, thanks to its Artificial Intelligence Center, which in 1966 demonstrated the world's first mobile robot to reason out its actions. Shakey, as the bot was called, had a TV camera, a triangulating range finder, bump sensors, and wireless radio and video communication links. Shakey also had pioneering software for perception, world modeling and actions such as moving, turning, avoiding obstacles and route planning. Today, Shakey's seminal roots have evolved into SRI's Open Agent Architecture (OAA), which is designed to shrink the computer to a transparent embedded device inside future smart information appliances. Using OAA, embedded computers can talk to each other and cooperate to autonomously achieve goals without human supervision. SRI envisions roving bands of software robots that work as smart agents to autonomously streamline electronic information exchanges by automatically responding to human interactions and work processes. OAA transforms Shakey-the-robot's vision into a web of autonomous hardware and software robots, each with embedded computer smarts that enable it to cooperate with others to achieve a human's goals without having to "bother" the human with the details of the information flow required to get the job done. In the end, SRI intends to create computers that autonomously achieve spoken human goals. The Century of the Engineer: Companies that made a difference
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