Augmentation Research Center

Some early ideas by Douglas Engelbart were developed in 1959 funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (now Rome Laboratory). They focused on methods of improving human intellectual capacity through the use of computers, specifically using interactivity. Ideas proposed center on aligning computer interfaces with the human brain by using displays and "other transducers". Further refinement of these ideas led to a March 10, 1960 essay Man-Machine Intelligent-Team Research where Engelbart breaks human cognition into "Activity Units", with an information-handling and materials-handling facility. He envisions information and material/objects freely flowing in and out, with a constant exchange of information between facilities. Engelbart takes this idea of "Activity Units" and made an expended functional model for implementation into a computer, looping into his cognition theory processors, displays, storage, and other discrete components. By October, 1962, a finalized framework document titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework was published which fully defined his theories dating back to a 1959 collection of notes.

J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), funded the project in early 1963. First experiments were done trying to connect a display at SRI to the massive one-of-a-kind AN/FSQ-32 computer at the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

Engelbart had volunteered ARC to provide the first reference library service on the ARPANET while it was being designed. The first message sent on ARPANET was between the ARC computer and UCLA. Larry Roberts continued to fund the ARC through DARPA IPTO until he left in 1974. The library service evolved into the Internet Network Information Center managed by Elizabeth J. Feinler. Bertram Raphael was put in charge of the project in 1976.