ORGANIZATION
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
The research institute where Engelbart built the NLS system and the Augmentation Research Center — and where, in 1975, the funding dried up and the augmentation vision lost its institutional platform.
The Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, is the independent nonprofit research organization where Douglas Engelbart conducted the work that produced the augmentation framework, NLS, and the Mother of All Demos. Between 1963 and 1977, SRI hosted the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), Engelbart's lab. At its peak, ARC employed dozens of researchers and was the second node on the ARPANET. In 1975 — the year Engelbart watched his research program collapse — SRI withdrew support, the team dispersed, and the computing industry moved decisively toward the automation paradigm that made Engelbart's work appear irrelevant.
In The You On AI Field Guide
SRI was founded in 1946 as a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford University, formally separated in 1970. Its funding model — a mix of government contracts (ARPA, NASA, NSF) and corporate research — made it institutionally vulnerable to shifts in research priorities. When ARPA's priorities shifted in the early 1970s away from long-term basic research toward more applied defense