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

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

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, Amazon, and Yahoo! While at PARC, Tesler's work includ ...

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 ...

. 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 entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; ...

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 computer scientist, businessman, and writer. He is currently based in Beijing, China. Lee developed a speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegi ...

), Educational Technology, Networking, Information Access, Distributed Operating systems, Collaborative Computing, Computer Graphics, and

Language/action perspective The language/action perspective "takes language as the primary dimension of human cooperative activity," applied not just in person-to-person direct (face-to-face) interactions, but also in the design of systems mediated by information and communic ...

. Many of these efforts are described in a special issue of the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 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. Atari and ''Pong'' Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, California, and attended the U ...

, 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 best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...

;

Bill Atkinson Bill Atkinson (born March 17, 1951) is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Atkinson was the principal designer and developer of the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Apple ...

;

; and laser printer inventor Gary Starkweather. 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 A quickdraw (also known as an extender) is a piece of climbing equipment used by rock and ice climbers to allow the climbing rope to run freely through protection such as a bolt anchors or other traditional gear while leading. A quickd ...

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

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 viewing ...

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 Macintosh computers, but delivered as a cross-platform system. QD3D was separated into two layers. ...

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 over ...

, 3DMF the 3D metafile graphics format,

ColorSync This is a list of macOS built-in apps and system components. Applications App Store The Mac App Store is macOS's digital distribution platform for macOS apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. based on the iOS version, the platform wa ...

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, ...

, Apple events,

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system aut ...

, 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 th ...

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 with the ma ...

software, the 1986 Möbius ARM based computer prototype, 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 languag ...

, the Newton 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 Imagineering ...

, 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 Apple Inc. subsidiaries Research institutes in California Information technology research institutes Research institutes established in 1986 1986 establishments in the United States