[gumby]

SRI is where Doug Engelbart worked developed the mouse and windowing interface (among other things) and put together the "Mother of all Demos".

SRI where the original ARPANET NIC was, and had various important roles in the development of the net.

I really don't think they overestimated their brand, they just talk to their likely customers.

(I worked at PARC, never at SRI, but I had many friends from SRI, and there was a flow of personnel in both directions).

[1letterunixname]

- Mouse, of course

- Magnetic check ink

- ERMA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Recording_Machine,_...

More importantly: Stanford, SRI, and the high signal of connected people in Palo Alto created lots of inventions and companies. Sports metaphor: when they're on the team, the team scores more indirectly by their presence. Palo Alto-Stanford has been a modern "Venice" in terms of center of business-meets-academic since about 1940. Boston owns it in academia in sheer numbers of campuses and of reputation, but not when it comes to tightening the iteration loops of making money.

[xhkkffbf]

Boston used to have a viable computer industry but it's all largely faded away with the minicomputers. Oh well. They've got the drug business now.

[jhbadger]

And in the 1980s and 1990s Boston used to have a great computer museum, but that closed in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston

[DonHopkins]

SRI-NIC was the center of the universe. All ARPANET TIPs/TACs had a special purpose command "@N" that would connect directly to the NIC's Tops-20 PDP-10 at SRI, where you could get news about the network status, communicate with the people running the net, and stuff like that.

[iancmceachern]

Also Surgical Robotics and Intuitive's Da Vinci:

https://www.sri.com/hoi/telerobotic-surgery/