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 unt ...

(DEC) in 1984, in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

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

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

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

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

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 headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

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 important 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+. While it has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java, C#, and Python) it has not be ...

programming language; the

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, 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 The MicroVAX 78032 (otherwise known as the DC333) is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that implements a subset of the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). The 78032 is used exclusively in DEC's ...

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

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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, ForMemRS, (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 ...

Chuck Thacker Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker (February 26, 1943 – June 12, 2017) was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI). Biography Th ...

, and

Leslie Lamport Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in Brooklyn) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and ...

, all recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award. A later inhabitant of this building is

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, a research part of

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

References

External links

Downloadable SRC publications

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