The Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was a corporate research laboratory at

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

from 1986 to 1997. ATG was an evolution of Apple's Education Research Group (ERG) and was started by

Larry Tesler Lawrence Gordon Tesler (April 24, 1945 – February 16, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple Inc., Apple, Amazon.com, Amazon, and Yahoo!. While at PA ...

in October 1986 to study long-term research into future technologies that were beyond the time frame or organizational scope of any individual product group. Over the next decade, it was led by David Nagel, Richard LeFaivre, and

Donald Norman Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially '' The Design o ...

. It was known as Apple Research Labs during Norman's tenure as VP of the organization.

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

closed the group when he returned to Apple in 1997. ATG had research efforts in both hardware and software, with groups focused on such areas as Human-Computer Interaction, Speech Recognition (by

Kai-Fu Lee Kai-Fu Lee (; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese businessman, computer scientist, investor, and writer. He is currently based in Beijing, China. Lee has worked as an executive, first at Apple, then SGI, Microsoft, and Google. He became the ...

), Educational Technology, Networking, Information Access, Distributed Operating systems, Collaborative Computing, Computer Graphics, and Language/action perspective. Many of these efforts are described in a special issue of the ACM

SIGCHI Bulletin The ''SIGCHI Bulletin'' is one of the two membership publications of ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction. The other publication is '' ACM interactions''. The Bulletin was first published in July 1982, though bea ...

which provided a retrospective of the ATG work after the lab was shut down. ATG was also home to four Apple Fellows:

Al Alcorn Allan Alcorn (born January 1, 1948) is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating ''Pong'', one of the first video games. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. Atari ...

, object-oriented software pioneer;

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox ...

;

Bill Atkinson William Dana Atkinson (March 17, 1951 – June 5, 2025) was an American computer engineer, computer programmer, and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Some of Atkinson's noteworthy contributions to the field of ...

;

; and laser printer inventor

Gary Starkweather Gary Keith Starkweather (January 9, 1938 – December 26, 2019) was an American engineer who invented the laser printer and color management. Starkweather received a B.S. in physics from Michigan State University in 1960 and an M.S. in optics f ...

. Further, ATG funded university research and, starting in 1992, held an annual design competition for teams of students. Apple's ATG was the birthplace of Color

QuickDraw QuickDraw was the 2D graphics library and associated application programming interface (API) which is a core part of classic Mac OS. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries ...

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

QuickTime VR QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewin ...

QuickDraw 3D QuickDraw 3D, or QD3D for short, is a 3D graphics API developed by Apple Inc. (then Apple Computer, Inc.) starting in 1995, originally for their Apple Macintosh, Macintosh computers, but delivered as a cross-platform system. QD3D was separated ...

QuickRing QuickRing was a gigabit-rate interconnect that combined the functions of a computer bus and a network. It was designed at Apple Computer as a multimedia system to run "on top" of existing local bus systems inside a computer, but was later taken ov ...

3DMF QuickDraw 3D, or QD3D for short, is a 3D graphics API developed by Apple Inc. (then Apple Computer, Inc.) starting in 1995, originally for their Macintosh computers, but delivered as a cross-platform system. QD3D was separated into two layers. ...

the 3D metafile graphics format,

ColorSync ColorSync is Apple Inc.'s color management API for the Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X operating systems. Version history Apple developed the original 1.0 version of ColorSync as a Mac-only architecture, which made it into an operating syste ...

HyperCard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...

Apple events Apple events are the message-based interprocess communication mechanism in Mac OS, first making an appearance in System 7 and supported by every version of the classic Mac OS since then and by macOS. Apple events describe "high-level" events such ...

, SK8,

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control of Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in macOS in a package of automation tools. The term ''AppleScript'' may ...

, Apple's

PlainTalk PlainTalk is the collective name for several speech synthesis (MacinTalk) and speech recognition technologies developed by Apple Inc. In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money in speech recognition technology, hiring many researchers in the ...

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

software, the

1986 Möbius ARM based computer prototype The Mac transition to Apple silicon was the process of switching the central processing units (CPUs) of Apple's line of Mac computers from Intel's x86-64 processors to Apple-designed Apple silicon ARM64 systems-on-a-chip. Apple CEO Tim Cook ...

, Apple Data Detectors, the V-Twin software for indexing, storing, and searching text documents, Macintalk Pro

Speech Synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

, the

Newton Newton most commonly refers to: * Isaac Newton (1642–1726/1727), English scientist * Newton (unit), SI unit of force named after Isaac Newton Newton may also refer to: People * Newton (surname), including a list of people with the surname * ...

handwriting recognizer, the component software technology leading to

OpenDoc OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It is one of Apple's ea ...

, MCF, HotSauce,

Squeak Squeak is an object-oriented, class-based, and reflective programming language. It was derived from Smalltalk-80 by a group that included some of Smalltalk-80's original developers, initially at Apple Computer, then at Walt Disney Imaginee ...

, and the children's programming environment

Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

(a trademark Apple later reused for its otherwise unrelated Cocoa application frameworks).

References

External links

SIGCHI: The Apple Advanced Technology Group
{{authority control Advanced Technology Group Research institutes in California Information technology research institutes Research institutes established in 1986 1986 establishments in the United States