SRI International

Drive east on Ravenswood Avenue from the Menlo Park Caltrain station and you pass a long, low research campus with few signs of its past. This is SRI International. For its first 24 years it belonged to Stanford. It has also been the birthplace of some of the most important ideas in computing.

Our overview of research labs near Palo Alto gives SRI a few paragraphs. This page goes further into the founding, the famous 1968 demo, the ARPANET node, the painful separation from Stanford and what SRI does now. Most facts come from SRI's own published history, a brief institutional history it posts as an appendix on its website.

Founded by Stanford in 1946

The idea came out of World War II, when universities had shown how much contract research could do. On January 24, 1946, Henry T. Heald, an outside adviser, recommended an institute "located at and operated in close affiliation with Stanford University." Stanford's trustees agreed in principle within a month. The charter was drafted that autumn, articles of incorporation were filed with the State of California in November 1946 and the trustees accepted the charter in December.

The new Stanford Research Institute started on campus. Within eight months it moved into part of the surplus Dibble Army Hospital in nearby Menlo Park, which is still roughly where SRI stands today. William Talbot was hired as the first director in early 1947. Jesse Hobson replaced him in early 1948.

Government money arrived almost at once. SRI's first annual report said 69 percent of its work in 1946 and 1947 was for government agencies. Early projects included a Navy-sponsored study of guayule, a desert shrub studied as a source of rubber.

Douglas Engelbart and the mouse

SRI's most famous researcher arrived in the 1950s. Douglas Engelbart believed computers could help people think and work together. At SRI he founded the Augmentation Research Center to build that vision. In 1964 the engineer Bill English built the first computer mouse from Engelbart's design, a wooden box with two wheels underneath.

The center's main product was NLS, short for the oN-Line System. It combined a mouse, a keyboard, a chord keyset and a screen in ways that let users jump between linked documents and edit text together. The project was jointly funded by the Air Force and ARPA, the Pentagon's research agency.

The oN-Line System demo, December 9, 1968

On December 9, 1968, Engelbart sat on a stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and showed NLS to a large audience. DARPA's account of the event gives the key details:

• Engelbart worked the mouse while his screen was projected 22 feet high, with video insets of the team.
• His terminal was connected by telephone lines to an SDS 940 computer about 30 miles away at SRI in Menlo Park.
• Team members in Menlo Park joined the presentation live.
• The large video projector was on loan from NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

The session later earned the nickname "the Mother of All Demos." Many of the ideas on show, from pointing devices to linked text and shared screens, took decades to reach ordinary computers. Several people who worked with Engelbart later moved to Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, which carried the ideas forward. Our Xerox PARC page picks up that thread.

The ARPANET node

Because Engelbart's group already worked on networked computing, SRI was a natural site for the ARPANET, the Defense Department network that grew into the internet. SRI's own history of the project describes UCLA as the first node and SRI as the second.

The first message is the part everyone remembers. In October 1969 a UCLA student tried to log in to the host computer at Stanford Research Institute. Only the "L" and the "O" arrived before the system crashed. SRI says that "on November 21, 1969, the ARPANET link between UCLA and SRI was firmly established." Many accounts date the first attempt to October 29, 1969, which is the date used on our research labs page. SRI's own page names only the month.

SRI also ran the network's address book. Elizabeth Feinler, head of SRI's Information Research Department, pioneered the Network Information Center for the ARPANET. Her group kept the tables of host names that let computers find each other and a directory of the technical notes called RFCs.

Shakey and early AI

SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center built Shakey, often called the first mobile robot that could reason about its actions, from about 1966 to 1972. The project, led by Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Peter Hart, was funded by DARPA. Work on Shakey produced the STRIPS planner and the A* search algorithm, which is still used in route finding. Life magazine called Shakey the "first electronic person" in 1970. Our page on Stanford and the history of AI places Shakey beside the university's own AI lab.

Protest and separation, 1967 to 1970

SRI's defense work made it a target during the Vietnam War. According to SRI's history, students began picketing in April 1967 over classified contracts that included chemical warfare and counterinsurgency research. By the end of 1968 many protesters wanted SRI cut loose from the university. The wider mood of those years is covered on our page about Palo Alto in the 1960s.

Acting President Robert Glaser set up a committee that studied the question for six months and recommended ending the association. The trustees issued a statement on May 13, 1969. SRI's history then states it plainly: "Stanford Research Institute became independent on March 31, 1970."

The split did not end the relationship. Stanford still sits a few miles away and the two share a long list of alumni, spinoffs and collaborations.

SRI since 1970

SRI's staff held steady at around 3,000 through the 1970s. In April 1987 it took over RCA's former research laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, as the David Sarnoff Research Center. Later decades brought a string of spinoffs. SRI created Siri Inc., which Apple bought in April 2010. It also helped launch Intuitive Surgical. In 2023 Xerox donated PARC, its famous Palo Alto lab, to SRI.

SRI's own figures in October 2026 describe an independent nonprofit research institute with about 1,500 researchers and professional staff, more than 50 spinoff companies and more than 13,000 patents filed. David Parekh is chief executive. Its work covers artificial intelligence, health, education, security, quantum technology and space.

Seeing SRI history

SRI's campus at 333 Ravenswood Avenue is a working research site. There are no public tours or visitor exhibits, so you will only see it from the street. A few nearby places tell its story better.

1. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View displays Shakey in a glass case. See our Computer History Museum guide.
2. Downtown Menlo Park is a short walk west of SRI. Our Menlo Park guide covers where to eat and what to see.
3. The Menlo Park Caltrain station sits where Ravenswood Avenue crosses the tracks. Details are on our Menlo Park station page.

For the bigger picture of how SRI, PARC, HP and Fairchild fit together, read our Silicon Valley history.

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