The Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was a corporate research laboratory at Apple Computer from 1986 to 1997.[1] ATG was an evolution of Apple's Education Research Group (ERG) and was started by Larry Tesler in October 1986 to study long-term research into future technologies that were beyond the time frame or organizational scope of any individual product group. Over the next decade, it was led by David Nagel, Richard LeFaivre,[2] and Donald Norman.[3] It was known as Apple Research Labs during Norman's tenure as VP of the organization. Steve Jobs closed the group when he returned to Apple in 1997.[4]
ATG had research efforts in both hardware and software, with groups focused on such areas as Human-Computer Interaction, Speech Recognition (by Kai-Fu Lee), Educational Technology, Networking, Information Access, Distributed Operating systems, Collaborative Computing, Computer Graphics, and Language/action perspective. Many of these efforts are described in a special issue of the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin which provided a retrospective of the ATG work after the lab was shut down. ATG was also home to four Apple Fellows: Al Alcorn, object-oriented software pioneer; Alan Kay; Bill Atkinson; Donald Norman; and laser printer inventor Gary Starkweather. Further, ATG funded university research and, starting in 1992, held an annual design competition for teams of students.
^Smykil, Jeff (June 2005). "In the Loop with Larry Yaeger: part I". Ars Technica. Retrieved February 27, 2012. Also at Apple, in the Advanced Technology Group, [Larry Yaeger] was Technical Lead in the development of the neural network-based handprint recognition system, the world's first genuinely usable handwriting recognition system, showcased in second generation Newton PDAs and Mac OS X's "Inkwell."