[HN Gopher] Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (2019)
Author : zdw
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-07-15 20:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abandonedamerica.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abandonedamerica.us)
| myself248 wrote:
| And they're tearing down the antenna:
| https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/save-big-bang-antenna/
| cycomanic wrote:
| The Horn antenna is at Crowford hill not Holmdel (confusing
| because they are both in the Holmdel township).
| evanelias wrote:
| The building is featured prominently in the show Severance as the
| hq of Lumon.
| anothermoron wrote:
| [dead]
| Aloha wrote:
| Yeah, when I watched the first episode, I was like "oh, shit
| thats Holmdel!"
| abh123 wrote:
| I got my COVID shot there.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Bell System buildings are the weirdest. There's art deco stuff
| like the St Paul MN central office, or the Mountain States
| Telephone and Telegraph building in downtown Denver, which is
| worth venturing into the lobby to see murals like "The Wings of
| Thought" and "The Crucible of Science" to industrial hulks like
| the Minneapolis main central office. There's a data center at
| 52nd and Zuni in Denver that's really 1960s.
|
| Then there's buildings so bland you can walk or drive by and you
| won't remember them, like the building at the corner of 15th and
| Curtis in Denver. Architectural blind spot.
| tomcam wrote:
| God, it's painful to see this. So much happened there. I read
| about it decades ago and dreamed of working there.
|
| I ended up working at Microsoft's Building 2, which was just as
| good. It was a giant plus sign, lined with individual offices and
| nestled in a veritable forest. I worked with some of the greatest
| minds in computer science, and they were all kind, helpful,
| brilliant people.
|
| I knew at the time it was special, knew it wouldn't last forever,
| and cherished every day there. It's gone too.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Fascinating to see a couple recent photos and find out what
| happened to this place.
|
| The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex is something that I find myself
| unexpectedly stumbling over on the Internet every few years or
| so. First time some circa 10 years ago, when they uploaded a 1973
| era training video for the computing services to `AT&T tech
| channel`:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9aVOIuKVUc
| js2 wrote:
| Raquel Welch taped up on the System 370:
|
| https://youtu.be/HMYiktO0D64?t=339
|
| I think it's this photo:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/a0wK4sR
|
| Her photo is the only personal item I see anywhere in the two
| videos.
| LegitShady wrote:
| its essentially been turned into a funny looking mall since
| 2019
|
| https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/
| zw123456 wrote:
| OMG Flashback memories of my internship there.
|
| It really should be turned into a tech museum or something.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I went to Holmdel High School, and my girlfriend's dad was a
| researcher at this facility, he invented a delta wave modulation
| technique in the 60's that was (is?) used by NASA for certain
| spaceship comms. I got to visit him once or twice here, it was
| truly an inspiring building with all of the open air quality and
| glass everywhere.
|
| Really part of another era, where AT&T sunk billions into the
| labs just for pure research. If only corporations could be a far
| seeing today.
| wslh wrote:
| I understand they were a cash cow which put the company in
| another league where cash flow is anormally high.
| etrautmann wrote:
| I share the sentiment but there are companies doing this - it's
| just in different domains than telephony. Deepmind, OpenAI,
| etc, fusion research, SpaceX. There are lots of long bets on
| hard tech. If anything it's a proliferation, although Bell labs
| is no longer a thing.
|
| My hope is that we can establish a similar model for biology,
| since many challenges in that domain are pre-commercial but not
| at the appropriate scale for academic labs.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| None of these efforts are as wide-ranging as AT&T's, though.
| Budget comparisons are hard for a number of reasons (AT&T had
| R&D happening in multiple places, under multiple funding
| streams, both directly and indirectly funded), but the usual
| thinking is that AT&T spent a larger % of revenue on research
| than most, but not all, organizations today, with Google
| being a notable example of a company that beats it on %
| revenue to R&D (is this still true?). My suspicion would be
| that that comparison wouldn't hold if you factored in the
| directly funded DoD work but it's hard to say without some
| pretty complex digging through accounting records.
|
| The more substantial point is breadth, though. AT&T research
| at its peak was more comparable to a university than an
| industrial R&D institution, with both basic and applied
| research occurring in a huge variety of fields---likely all
| fields of physical science at various points. All of the
| organizations you mention are essentially single-purpose.
| Some of the major tech companies (Google, Microsoft) are
| known for wide-ranging R&D, but they seem to have struggled
| to produce the kind of basic advances that AT&T did, and also
| seem to be backing off of that work.
|
| Basic research is the big problem... AT&T had very little
| problem with money going to basic research without known
| applications, likely due to the substantial influence that
| academia and "scientific management" had on AT&T, as well as
| its reputation for excellent research management practices
| that made AT&T a major part of basic physics research on the
| behalf of the DoD for decades (Sandia National Laboratories,
| for example, operated by AT&T until relatively recently). In
| my opinion, accounts of Bell Labs enormous success, having
| made major contributions to nearly every field of
| engineering, often focus too much on the excellence of its
| staff (which was a factor, although Bell Labs management
| practices were not exactly modern), and downplay the role of
| AT&T's willingness to fund basic research and ability to find
| outside funding for basic research as well. Few modern
| organizations seem to be willing to entertain major efforts
| in a nascent field of astronomy, for example, on the
| assumption that the technical work will lead to useful
| engineering knowledge.
|
| There's a lot out there about the history of Bell Labs, but
| its own multi-volume "A History of Engineering and Science in
| the Bell System," from the late '70s, does a good job of
| covering the incredible breadth and scale of work performed
| at Bell Labs. One thing to consider is that costs were quite
| a bit lower back then, and so Bell Labs small-looking budget
| of $3-5 billion of today's dollars per year translated to a
| workforce in the tens of thousands working, during WWII,
| 70-hour weeks. A two-day weekend did finally reach most of
| the Bell Labs technical staff early in the Cold War.
|
| Besides, if you read into the history of Bell Labs, you will
| recognize vestiges of its bureaucratic structure in most
| government and military R&D today. Its influence in
| government and military physical research is enormous.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Fusion isn't a good example. It's not getting anywhere near
| the funding it requires. Maybe I've become cynical, but it
| seems like all the big new technology products which have
| come out in the last decade or two have just been software
| products mostly designed to predict human behavior more
| accurately to advertise to us. AT&T invented solar panels,
| the transistor, radio astronomy, as well as computing
| innovations that we're still using today. It's hard to
| imagine we'll hold Google, Apple, or Facebook in the same
| reverence 100 years from now because they created some
| interesting consumer products which distract us for a couple
| years before going in the trash to be replaced by the next,
| slightly more distracting version
| thevania wrote:
| sir, i must respectfully disagree - bell labs is still a
| thing
|
| disclaimer - i work there as a senior researcher and we still
| do world class research, so pls don't portrait us as a thing
| of the past just yet, thx :)
| graphviz wrote:
| Whether or not AT&T was far-seeing, they had a mandate to
| design and deliver universal telephone service, and cost-plus
| deal to pay for it, so it made sense to buy nice expensive
| things. Even when the mission was fulfilled and the economy
| started to restructure the company, it ran along for at least
| another 10 or 15 years before the real disruption started (the
| 1996 breakup that turned Bell Labs into Lucent). And even then,
| the labs contributed fundamental research in machine learning,
| quantum computing and databases, to name a few areas. As you
| say, that model of large-scale corporate R&D doesn't exist any
| more - there's no funding model to support it.
| etrautmann wrote:
| How do you figure? The model now has been tech companies for
| the last 15 years.
| treyd wrote:
| I can't speak for the previous commenter but it does seem
| there is a different character to the research work
| happening at FAANG-scale companies (which is still
| generally in service of their corporate strategy) vs the
| work that happened at Bell Labs back in the day (which was
| more abstract and less directly-commercializable). Bell
| Labs was more of a large team of brilliant researchers with
| ample resources to support their work, and it just had to
| be useful to somebody rather than be part of a
| product/service that could be sold directly.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| You're right. The invention of the transistor was a
| multi-decade effort by scientists working outside of
| regular hours, essentially inventing the field of solid
| state physics. It's hard to imagine such a technology
| coming out of a publicly traded company like Google or
| Apple, whose year-to-year or even quarter-to-quarter
| behavior is as sensitive to changes in interest rates and
| short term market conditions as a balloon in the wind.
| Aloha wrote:
| The only way this worked when was AT&T had a virtual monopoly
| on all telecommunications (design, installation, services, etc)
| in the US, and had their rates set using a rate of return
| derived pricing mechanism.
|
| We can probably get such things back, but they are not Free
| exactly.
|
| RCA had similar labs, but I think changes to the tax code makes
| them less worthwhile to do today as well.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| It's interesting how the area around NYC was the silicon valley
| of the mid 20th century. Most of the country's tech innovation
| was coming out of Bell and IBM. Has that area's loss of dominance
| solely been due to all the tech industry moving to California?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Tech was present in California in the mid-late 20th century; in
| fact, Silicon Valley was founded by an ex-Bell scientist named
| Bill Shockley, who shared a Nobel prize for the transistor. His
| company didn't do well, but ex-employees founded Fairchild
| Semiconductor, whose ex-employees founded Intel. This brought
| along many other tech companies, such as Atari, Apple, and the
| like.
|
| Though Bell labs continued to innovate into the 70s and 80s,
| the AT&T monopoly was split up, which left Bell Labs with
| significantly less cash to invest into pure research with. IBM
| also lost the PC wars, ironically even though the PC became the
| international default for a microcomputer by the 80s and 90s.
|
| So, yes, while tech moved west, the existing eastern behemoths
| had their own troubles which led to their downfall, independent
| of California. At the same time, Stanford became a major hiring
| location for these tech companies, and its engineering
| departments gained nationwide recognition. Companies moved to
| California to get access to Stanford talent.
|
| Source - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of
| American Innovation by Jon Gertner
| rcpt wrote:
| It's the building used in the TV show Severance.
|
| I had a job offer to join Nvidia's office there years ago. Worst
| financial decision of my life not taking it.
| gttalbot wrote:
| Yeah I worked in here for Lucent before the OG dotcom crash. It's
| a pretty neat building. When you went in back in those days,
| there was a big communication satellite suspended over the entry
| lounge, with various things like telephones, transistors, etc.,
| which were productionized here. IIUC there are antennas on the
| property used to discover the Big Bang too. There's also a big
| water tower in the shape of a transistor over a reflecting pool.
| It was a rough time watching this building emptied out into
| dumpsters during Lucent's auguring-in.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Note that the complex is now Bell Works and quite busy now. There
| are a number of tech companies there and importantly Nokia Bell
| Labs relocated from Crawford Hill to Bell Works ~2-3 years ago
| (this is also the reason why there is talk about dismantling the
| Horn Antenna, which is on the Crawford Hill site, which IIRC was
| sold recently).
| fewald_net wrote:
| This building reminds me of one of the ones from the University
| of Freiburg, Germany: https://ais.badische-
| zeitung.de/piece/07/58/57/cf/123230159-...
|
| Google: KG 2 Uni Freiburg
| keninorlando wrote:
| This is now Bell Works: https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/
| every wrote:
| Nice to look at but I can hear voices, conversions and footsteps
| echoing everywhere...
| JonasJSchreiber wrote:
| I worked there for two years. It's quite beautiful now, a bunch
| of companies, and has a Montessori, an escape room, golf
| simulator, and a food court.
| gfodor wrote:
| In high school I worked for Lucent in this building after school
| and over summers. It's where I learned UNIX, vim, Perl, and how
| web servers worked. It bums me out seeing that it now is
| basically a big mall. Hopefully there are some cool startups that
| come out of it.
| barathr wrote:
| Lots of good stuff like this on the author's feed here:
| https://mastodon.social/@AbandonedAmerica
| rrdharan wrote:
| I was an intern here the summer after my sophomore year in
| college. I just assumed all office buildings were this epic and
| only later realized how fortunate I was.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I worked here - my first job in the US, via a contracting agency,
| for a few weeks until I totalled my then-girlfriend's car, broke
| my arm, and could no longer commute from Philadelphia.
|
| Worst programming job I ever had. My assigned task: change the
| constant that limited how many forwarding steps a phone could
| follow in one of their private telephone routing systems, from 32
| to 64. That meant: change the macro/definition in a .h file,
| update the documentation string.
|
| Planned time for this change: 1 week.
|
| There's a reason those telephone switches written in C actually
| worked so reliably, but oh god, not the life for me.
|
| Did I mention the office^H^H^H^H^H^Hcloset I had to work in.
|
| Very happy to never come close to this vision of programming ever
| again.
| onecommentman wrote:
| (2019), now Bell Works
|
| https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/
| lasermatts wrote:
| I grew up in Monmouth County and I think back fondly on all the
| old Bell Labs folks who stayed in the area. They were my soccer
| coaches/math teachers/friendly old folks in the neighborhood, and
| it wasn't until I was in high school did I fully understand the
| brilliant minds I was lucky enough to learn from.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-16 23:00 UTC)