[HN Gopher] Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
Author : Hooke
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-03-10 06:14 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sts10.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (sts10.github.io)
| aborsy wrote:
| The term Bell Labs is used today mostly for advertisement. It
| hasn't long produced much. It became Alcatel Lucent and now
| Nokia, not known as a particularly innovative company.
| msvana wrote:
| Well I guess the author of the blog post agrees, since he talks
| about "its demise in the 1980s". Probably a lot of things have
| changed since then and honestly I am kinda curious about it.
| nolongerthere wrote:
| EH, once ma bell got broken up, not much of interest
| happened. My dad worked out of their Naperville office until
| it closed down. By that point it was less R&D and more, "how
| do we make money".
| tpmoney wrote:
| Probably in large part because when you're no longer a
| monopoloy, you can't soak the consumer for enough extra
| margin to spend many person years of time and money going
| nowhere most of the time.
|
| That's putting it harshly of course, but it's probably
| notable that the only places you might find something
| approaching a team or department like the Bell Labs of old
| are large incumbents in fields like Apple or Microsoft. If
| you're a smaller competitor or in a highly competitive
| space, you don't have the luxury of being able to spend
| large chunks of money and people on R&D that may never
| produce anything useful or salable. In theory you might be
| able to get something like this out of academia, but then
| you run into the publish or perish mindsets.
|
| I wonder if one way the states and federal government could
| encourage development in towns and areas that are dying as
| the world consolidates and small towns lack opportunity
| would be to subsidize these sorts of non-competitive R&D
| spaces in those otherwise undesirable living areas. A sort
| of multi pronged subsidy, to both the workers (discounted
| home loans, dedicated public transport), to the local
| industries (grants or loans to builders in the area to
| build homes and infrastructure) and to the companies
| themselves (tax incentives, short term subsidizing of
| salaries etc), and in exchange the public and the
| government gets the results of the research perhaps under
| reduced term patents or special licensing deals.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I grew up across a cornfield from the Naperville office,
| and so our then new subdivision included dads and moms who
| worked there on engineering topics.
|
| One thing unmentioned we benefited from as kids in the 80s
| was super kick ass technical book stores in Naperville and
| Wheaton.
|
| I was sad seeing the big red zero logo of Lucent on the new
| building across the street, and the withering of the place.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Too young to have been there, and too young not to take that type
| of progress that came from Bell Labs for granted, - I now realize
| that 20th century progress came, not from natural competition,
| but from the strong forcing function of utility-guided free
| research.
|
| After 20 years of hoping for a Bell Labs to magically show up
| again, I now work to emulate this culture but with a focus on
| energy systems that has the same characteristics as combustion
| engines but with 10x power/energy-density (and zero emissions).
|
| If this resonates with anyone here, feel free to reach out.
| REDS1736 wrote:
| Just a heads up; the "About Morten" page of your website is
| just lorem ipsum
| lokimedes wrote:
| Thanks, yes, we are pretty early setting this up, you can
| find me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skaersoe/
| jmspring wrote:
| Bell Labs was a name when my dad was a lineman then did I'm not
| sure what in the Bay Area between Sacramento and SF. Management
| stuff I guess (I was young). But between him and my mother
| working for AT&T ... it wasn't bell labs but we had a terminal
| and modem at the house before those were common.
|
| I may have done some exploring.
|
| For me in my college years, it was Xerox Parc (well past the
| heyday of the mouse and such) working in image compression. Parc
| was still an entity.
|
| Raw research is what I miss. No one really does it anymore.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| My family lived just down the road from Bell Labs in Murray
| Hills, NJ, in 1978. One of my fondest memories of that period is
| visiting Bell Labs for an open day.
|
| We saw displays of their research work and got to talk to some of
| the researchers. Some was fundamental semiconductor physics
| (which my dad loved, as he had a PhD in the area). Much was about
| the practicalities of running a telephone network. And a few
| displays were a glimpse of the future. Using the prototype video
| phone felt like being in an episode of the Jetsons!
| pram wrote:
| ATT has a bunch of Bell Labs stuff on their Youtube channel, it's
| all a pro watch. This is one of my favorites, about people
| submitting their code to get processed at their computing center:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64
|
| Watching it made me realize a lot of batch-esque things like
| Hadoop and Spark aren't too far off, just more automated.
| sllabres wrote:
| I loved the Bell Labs Technical Journal (then AT&T Technical
| Journal) for as long as it was freely available in the 90s. A lot
| of the content revolved around technologies like SS7 or the large
| AT&T ESS switches, which were not relevant to me. But there were
| always very interesting ideas in the papers which let me think a
| bit outside the box.
|
| I remember reports like "The AT&T Switching Evolution Challenge",
| "Software in Large", "Improving on the Best: Like a 1A, Only
| Better", "Components for Software Fault Tolerance and
| Rejuvenation", or scientific reports like " Studies of Large-
| Scale Earth Potentials Across Oceanic Distances".
|
| After more than thirty years, I still have many of them in a
| thick folder. Thanks to everyone who inspired me back then and
| gave me an peek into a different IT world!
| quantum_state wrote:
| It's a great pity such a great institution ended up in its
| current diminishing state due to a series of events related to
| the divestiture.. see
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System. This
| makes one wonder ...
| aborsy wrote:
| Although some of the success of the old bell labs was because
| it was a monopoly, so it could afford long term investment.
| It's a different environment now.
| quantum_state wrote:
| Yeah ... the question is: where would the next Bell Labs come
| from for long term scientific endeavors? The national labs?
| But the funding there can be quite volatile ... The
| universities? But it could run the risk of being too
| academic. There is a need for an environment like the old
| Bell Labs, with problems and opportunities coming from
| practical matters, yet with folks who are interested in
| solving the problems but not stopping at solving the problems
| only ...
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Google (Alphabet) is the successor to Bell Labs.
| Merrill wrote:
| My recollection is that the operating telephone companies
| paid AT&T 1% of revenues as the license fee for use of AT&T's
| patents. This funded AT&T's engineering department as well as
| Bell Labs research, systems engineering and advanced
| development. Th other main chunk of civilian work was
| development engineering funded by Western Electric. Prior to
| the end of the anti-missile systems military work, the
| military budget was greater than civilian work.
|
| Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a
| little. There may have also been additional operating company
| funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed
| administrative software for their use.
|
| The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free
| environment is incorrect. In the development organizations
| there was fierce competition between developers of analog
| versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial
| cable systems, space division versus time-division switching,
| etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but
| having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure
| there was considerable competition for resources, funding,
| and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.
| EZ-Cheeze wrote:
| A place that takes you out of ordinary life
|
| Humanist, surprising, challenging but comforting at the same time
|
| On the top floor, bright sunspots are cast onto the floor,
| peeking through the roof as if through the dense branches of an
| old forest
|
| New kinds of thinking, new kinds of connections, new kinds of
| possibilities. The mission is to uncover more never-known-before
| territories every day. Permutations evolving through randomness,
| experimentation and pattern recognition. Start a thousand
| projects and add a hundred every day.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| What companies in the modern day are like working at Bell Labs
| along the important dimensions? (E.g., impact, colleague quality,
| etc.) Asking for a friend.
|
| I suspect the old Pivotal Labs was like this, if you can speak
| enough enterprise-ese to figure it out.
| nunez wrote:
| Google Brain and Microsoft Research in the private sector. Air
| Force Research Lab, the folks at Oak Ridge and Sandia and some
| others in the public sector. (So, so, so many things were
| invented by DOD scientists and engineers. Defense is big
| business!)
| j7ake wrote:
| Probably DeepMind considering the accomplishments of alphafold.
| octopusRex wrote:
| It's no longer about the engineers - it's all about the
| shareholders.
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. Because organizations like the AT&T monopoly when you
| paid $1/minute for phone calls and couldn't connect your own
| equipment didn't have shareholders. This kind of idealization
| of the past gets old.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| There was a charm to old AT&T. One that we didn't see again
| till peak Nokia.
|
| An AT&T handset could be used to beat up a burglar and then
| still be used to call the police. They were, to say the
| least, indestructible.
|
| Nokia phones were that way for a bit (I forget what model
| number) where you could have them fly off the roof of your
| car at speed, and find them run over twice and still working
| (assuming the battery stayed in).
|
| The latest iPhone flying out of a plane "window" and then
| landing still running and unbroken was an impressive moment
| and harkened back to earlier times.
|
| The break up of att lead to a race to the bottom on handsets,
| they were disposable in a bad way for a while.
| owisd wrote:
| AT&T had shareholders, but they also had a public interest
| mandate imposed on them by antitrust regulations, so couldn't
| operate on the modern notion that shareholder value is all
| that matters.
| trollied wrote:
| Ended up being a part of them when Lucent bought the business I
| worked for. I would never ever say I was a part of them.
| Undeserved.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-10 23:01 UTC)