Much of tech-boom seeded by non-profit firm's efforts

Duncan Martell

SAN FRANCISCO: And most people think of the big guns of high-technology:

Intel, Hewlett-Packard and even quirky Apple Computer.

But the computer boom and the Internet owe a good part of their existence to

the efforts of hundreds of engineers over the decades at a nonprofit research

organization based in leafy Menlo Park, Calif., just down the street from an

independent bookstore.

SRI International Inc. - founded in 1946 as Stanford Research Institute,

because, well, back then there wasn't any other research lab out there - doesn't

cut a high profile. In fact, for an institution that practically invented and

gave the first demonstration of personal computing in 1968 and received the

first Internet transmission, it's practically invisible to the lay person.

"We're in all of the things for the next century that are

interesting," said SRI president and chief executive Curtis Carlson, a

lanky Swede who has a doctorate degree in atmospheric science.

"The mouse, hypertext, Windows, all those things came from here, but

we've actually always been very understated about our accomplishments," he

said.

Not alone



To be sure, there are other research labs in the Valley - including Xerox's
famous Palo Alto Research Center, which also helped to invent the graphical user

interface, which eventually became the Macintosh operating systems and later,

Windows. There's also International Business Machines Corp.'s Almaden Research

Center nestled in the hills above San Jose, Calif., where the computer disk

drive was invented.

But SRI, as a nonprofit organization, seeks to strike a balance between the

intellectual horsepower of a university, the entrepreneurship of a start-up and

the resources of a large corporation. With 2000 revenue of only $164 million,

excluding its subsidiaries, that can be a hard task.

So it gets a boost, Carlson said, by partnering with large companies,

government agencies and the like so it can pool its brainpower with deeper

pockets.

Clients include Hitachi, Monsanto Corp., NASA, the National Institutes of

Health, the National Science Foundation as well as the US departments of

Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Transportation and the United States

Postal Service. "At a university you have great innovation, but not the

infrastructure necessarily to support that; in the commercial setting there are

bureaucratic hold-ups," Carlson said.

Spin-offs



Earlier in his career, Carlson worked for RCA's corporate research lab, helping
to develop the precursor to high-definition television, and it was frustrating.

"We had all the money in the world and nothing happened," he said.

"It was a little bit like the Xerox story." Xerox, while renowned for

its technical developments, has long been criticized for failing to

commercialize them and bring them to market. SRI used to be like that, too,

Carlson said, but has changed its ways in recent years.

Sometimes technology developed at SRI is compelling enough to spin off into

its own company, with one example being Intuitive Surgical, which makes

minimally invasive surgical systems that grew out of robotic surgery technology

and products that SRI developed in the 1990s.

SRI has participated in five ventures with venture-capital firm Mayfield,

itself a Silicon Valley fixture since 1969, and SRI does return ownership in

some of its spin-off companies. "We invest all of the money we make back

into the institute."

The 'Geoweb'



A tour of SRI's 66-acre campus in Menlo Park reveals a work setting far removed
from the antiseptic cubicle farms that constitute many of Silicon Valley's

larger companies. The buildings date back to the 1950s and resemble more a

university or well-used government buildings than a hotbed of technological

innovation.

Peek into some of the offices and personal computers are surrounded by stacks

of paper, manila folders and the like. Cobwebs hang from ventilation openings in

the ceilings and signs such as "Research on extreme deformation and failure

of materials and structures" hang on doors.

But beyond just technology, SRI is intimately involved in research on

biotechnology, the human genome, advanced technology for the military, computer

languages, software programming and myriad other areas, Carlson said. One of his

favorite current projects is what he calls the GeoWeb. "There are all these

search engines out there and you ask for something and you can get a zillion

responses," Carlson said.

"But what about asking the Web for every restaurant within two miles of

SRI? What about giving virtually every object on the planet an Internet

address," he said. Another of his favorite, current areas is biotechnology.

Already SRI has experience in this area, having helped to develop a vaccine for

Malaria that has saved millions of lives, Carlson said.

"Decoding the human genome is only the beginning," Carlson said.

"Where we are now in biology is we're still carving on stone as far as

where we want to be."

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.