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Vol.30 No.2, April 1998
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In late 1997, Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group reached the end of its existence. It had been started in October 1986 by Larry Tesler to allow Apple to study questions, technologies, and user issues that were beyond the time frame or organizational scope of any individual product group. Throughout the years, it served those purposes to different parts of Apple in different ways: to product engineering groups, by surveying future directions in computing technology and, through experiments, protototypes, and product collaborations, finding appropriate ways of applying them to Apple's business; to marketing groups, by looking farther and deeper into user/customer needs than the immediate charters of those groups allowed; and to sales groups, by demonstrating to current and future customers what Apple cared about, and how those concerns were likely to express themselves in the future. And, along the way, we maybe pushed science forward a bit, and had more than a little fun.
The real world is sometimes a harsh place, and we finally reached the end of our run. ATG wasn't the first research group to go this way, and it won't be the last. But, in our latter days, we recognized a disturbing trend in the closing-down of various product and research groups throughout the industry: The work stops, boxes are packed, people move on, and, a few months later, it's as if the group had never existed. No one knows what they had really done; even the people involved can forget. This is a bad thing. We decided that it wasn't going to happen to us. Hence, this issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin.
Understand: This is not a complete history of ATG; someone else will have to compile that. Indeed, over the years, ATG pursued a wide range of projects, spanning the field of computing. There was no shortage of projects on hardware architectures, or programming languages, or networking substrates. But, in recent years, virtually all of the work in ATG was focused on topics that held human-computer interaction close to their heart. This should not be surprising, given Apple's long-standing concern for the role of people in computing. It also made the Bulletin an obvious place to go in search of a way to capture what ATG was in its closing days. Think of this not as a history, but as a snapshot of an organization at a particular point in time. As with any family snapshot, much of the fun of looking at it is figuring out how those people got there, and where they went next. Or might have gone next....
Thanks are surely due to those who led ATG during its lifetime: Larry Tesler, Dave Nagel, Rick LeFaivre, and Don Norman. There are, of course, many people who made ATG what it was; too many to name some without omitting others. Nor will I try to acknowledge every project carried out by ATG. But, in these days in which companies are quite appropriately asking what concrete benefits they receive from their investments in research organizations, it's worth looking back on the products that originated in ATG and had a significant impact on Apple's business, if not the world:
If someone ever evaluates research labs on their contribution to the companies that funded them, we'll be happy to put this list up against anyone else's.
This volume of the Bulletin contains a broad collection of papers; it's roughly structured to parallel the organizational structure of ATG at its close. You'll see overview papers on laboratories around which ATG's work was organized, and individual research papers that capture the topics, the content, and the style of work that was underway.
Thanks to Steven Pemberton for offering us the SIGCHI Bulletin as a medium for capturing what ATG was about at its very end. For myself, thanks to everyone at Apple who made ATG such a rewarding, exciting, and meaningful place to work. Something like ATG is easy to take for granted; in retrospect, you often don't know what you've got until it's gone.
Jim Miller, until recently, was the program manager for Intelligent Systems in Apple's Advanced Technology Group. He is currently exploring consumer applications of Internet technology as part of Miramontes Computing.
Jim Miller
Miramontes Computing
828 Sladky Avenue
Mountain View CA 94040, USA
email: jmiller@millerclan.com
Tel: +1-650-967-2102
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