SRI International: Where the Modern World Was Invented

Just off the highway in Menlo Park sits a low-slung research campus that has quietly shaped the modern world more than almost any institution most people have never heard of. SRI International, originally founded as the Stanford Research Institute on October twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-six, was established by Stanford University as an applied research center to fuel economic development in the western United States. Within months it moved off-campus to Menlo Park, and it has been here ever since.

The list of things invented or pioneered at SRI reads like a history of the twentieth century's most useful technologies. In the mid-nineteen fifties, SRI developed the magnetic ink character recognition process, the system that allows banks to read the numbers on the bottom of checks. That technology became the global banking standard. SRI researchers also worked in nineteen forty-eight on a synthetic replacement for the fats used in soap, which Procter and Gamble later used as the basis for Tide laundry detergent, one of the first synthetic detergents, which transformed how Americans do laundry.

But SRI's most consequential work happened in computing. In nineteen sixty-four, researcher Douglas Engelbart and engineer Bill English built the first computer mouse here, a small wooden box on wheels with a single button. Engelbart's vision was to augment human intellect, to use computers to help people think and collaborate in ways they never had before.

On December ninth, nineteen sixty-eight, Engelbart stood before an audience in San Francisco and demonstrated a system he had built at SRI called the oN-Line System, or NLS. In ninety minutes, he showed the world video conferencing, hypertext links, collaborative document editing, and the mouse as an input device. The audience had never seen any of it. The presentation later became known as the Mother of All Demos, because virtually everything demonstrated that day eventually became the standard interface of the modern internet.

The following year, SRI became the second node on the ARPANET, the government research network that grew into the internet itself. The ideas that started here rippled outward until they changed everything.