Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better known by its odd acronym, NLS. SRI International is one of the worlds largest contract research institutions. ... Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Norwegian descent. ... In general, information processing is the changing [(processing)] of information in any manner detectable by an observer. ... The NLS workstation showing the CRT display, keyboard, pushbuttons, and mouse NLS, or the oNLine System, was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. ...

Dr. Engelbart recruited coworkers and ran the organization until the late 1970s, when funding and support for the laboratory dissipated. Eventually, SRI's management arranged for Engelbart to be fired from the lab which he had created. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ...

The complex story of the rise and fall of ARC has been thoroughly documented in a book by sociologist Thierry Bardini. It was also indirectly covered in many other books about Xerox PARC, since that is where many ARC employees later fled to (and brought some of Engelbart's ideas with them). Sociology is the study of the social lives of humans, groups and societies. ... Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Research Laboratory in Multimedia Communication. ... Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA. It was founded in 1970 and spun out as a separate company in 2002. ...

A number of early participants moved on to careers at Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and other leading computer companies. Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) is the worlds largest supplier of toner-based (dry ink) photocopier machines and associated supplies. ... The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... Sun Microsystems is a computer, semiconductor and software manufacturer headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. ...