[HN Gopher] 100 years of Bell Labs [pdf]
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       100 years of Bell Labs [pdf]
        
       Author : cloked
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2025-01-26 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (novitoll.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (novitoll.com)
        
       | jtbetz22 wrote:
       | This is a fun read, and, unlike a lot of material on the Labs,
       | goes back a lot further than 1947.
       | 
       | As a software engineer, my favorite book on the topic is "Unix: A
       | History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan. It tells many of the
       | same stories that are told elsewhere about the modern history of
       | the Labs, but through the first-person perspective of someone who
       | was there, for whom the characters are not just historical
       | figures, but friends.
        
       | dave333 wrote:
       | As a newly landed immigrant to the US I worked at Bell Labs in
       | Naperville IL for most of the decade of the 1980s and I have a
       | few fun memories mostly of extra-curricular stuff.
       | 
       | There was a Unix version of the popular Aliens video game built
       | with curses and played on 9600 baud terminals and when the Pacman
       | video game came out I hacked the Aliens code to play it.
       | Initially I had the monsters represented by 'M' until the player
       | hit the appropriate button that made them run away instead when I
       | changed the character for the monsters to 'W' for wimp. This ran
       | afoul of the affirmative action police as it suggested
       | superiority of 'M'en over 'W'omen so I hastily changed 'W' to
       | 'S'.
       | 
       | Another time there was a paper airplane contest where the planes
       | were launched from the 4th floor walkway into the atrium of the
       | Indian Hill West building. There were prizes for the longest
       | distance flight, longest time flight, fastest plane and most
       | beautiful flight. I won the latter with a helicopter-like plane
       | that just spun its way slowly to the floor.
       | 
       | The best talk I remember giving was one explaining the game of
       | cricket that took a full hour, and as for work contributions I
       | can only remember coming up with the idea to use the geometric
       | mean to summarize benchmark results.
       | 
       | PS one more - my first US code review I spent about 30 mins
       | explaining how my code worked with few if any questions from the
       | other participants. Finally I asked if there were any other
       | questions when someone hesitantly said - "Yes, what is this
       | variable "zed" that you keep talking about?"
        
         | wbl wrote:
         | If your only contribution to a field is a trivial mathematical
         | observation you are in excellent company.
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princ...
        
       | Optimal_Persona wrote:
       | TIL that Harvey Fletcher (who I knew from his acoustic/audio
       | work, particularly the Fletcher-Munson loudness curve)
       | contributed to the Millikan oildrop experiment. Thanks!
       | 
       | Another great resource for understanding what went on at Bell
       | Labs is Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Engineering: Learning
       | to Learn"
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-26 23:00 UTC)