ORGANIZATION
Augmentation Research Center (ARC)
Engelbart's lab at SRI from 1963 to 1977 — the institutional home of the augmentation framework, the NLS system, and the first community of practitioners to live inside their own bootstrapping loop.
The Augmentation Research Center was the specific unit within SRI that Engelbart founded and led. ARC's mission was the development of tools and methods for augmenting human intellect — and its distinguishing characteristic was that the team used the tools it was developing to do its own work. The researchers wrote their papers in NLS. They collaborated through NLS. They planned the development of NLS using NLS. ARC was the first community to fully implement the bootstrapping principle — and the collapse of ARC funding in 1975 was the event that ended the research program Engelbart had spent twelve years building.
In The You On AI Field Guide
At its peak in the early 1970s, ARC employed around forty-five researchers, making it one of the larger computing research groups of its era. The community had its own internal culture — a culture of using tools to improve tools, of collaborative intellectual work as the primary mode of