Augmentation Research Center

The Augmentation Research Center (usually given as the acronym, ARC) was a research group started by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute. It did work in ground-breaking work in the areas of user interfaces and applications.

Among their notable innovations were the invention of the mouse, 'cut and pasting' of text blocks, and hypertext.

Further reading

• Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford University Press, 2000
• John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, Viking Press, 2005 - covers much else, but has good coverage of the history of ARC, and work there
• M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, Viking Penguin, 2001 - Licklider, who had been thinking along the same lines, was an early backer of ARC