The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) in 1984, in

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) of

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

after an internal power struggle. SRC survived the takeover of DEC by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

in 1998. It was renamed to "Compaq Systems Research Center". When Compaq was acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

in 2002, SRC was merged with other HP corporate research labs and relocated there. After Taylor's retirement, the lab was directed by Roy Levin and then by Lyle Ramshaw. Some of the critical developments made at SRC include the

Modula-3 Modula-3 is a programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2 known as Modula-2+. It has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java, C#, Python and Nim), but it ha ...

programming language; the snoopy cache, used in the first multiprocessor workstation, the

Firefly The Lampyridae are a family of elateroid beetles with more than 2,000 described species, many of which are light-emitting. They are soft-bodied beetles commonly called fireflies, lightning bugs, or glowworms for their conspicuous production ...

, built from MicroVAX 78032 microprocessors; the first multi-threaded Unix system, Taos; the first user interface editor; early networked window systems, Trestle.

AltaVista AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

was jointly developed by researchers from DEC's Network Systems Laboratory, Western Research Laboratory and Systems Research Center. Among the researchers at SRC, there are

Butler Lampson Butler W. Lampson (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the Lawrencev ...

, Chuck Thacker, and Leslie Lamport, all recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award. A later inhabitant of this building is A9.com, a research part of

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

References

External links

Downloadable SRC publications

Archived SRC Lab site
Educational buildings in Santa Clara County, California Systems Research Center Laboratories in the United States {{SantaClaraCountyCA-struct-stub