Hello all,
interesting posts on Bell Labs. What got away from Bell Labs is often,
to me, more interesting... such as Unix, which was a very important
system, but got its most attractive features (virtual memory management
to networking sockets) when Tom London, whom I worked with, took the
code over to Berkeley and Bill Joy hacked in some of these features.
There was a lot of politics within the labs, especially in the more
practical/engineering type research divisions, but once you got out into
the stuff that nobody cared about, you met great people -- after all,
its not every day you get to eat lunch with a Nobel laureate in
astronomy, like Bob Wilson!
By the times the 90s rolled around, outside of some small developments
in the hard science stuff, the Labs to some extent made itself
irrelevant with its outdated structure and "not invented here" attitude.
Hence the lack of significant Labs work in Internet technologies
(despite being the best poised for such contributions).
I must say though that behind the few amazing breakthroughs in science
and technology, the Labs also housed/funded/protected a large
non-productive population.
Raghu wrote:
>
> But AT&T probably did not
> even make much money out of many other Bell Labs achievements e.g.
> information theory and Unix (in the latter case, they tried but were
> prevented by law I believe).
>
Yes, until the 1984 divestiture, AT&T was prevented from selling any
computer hardware or software products. The history as I recall is that
AT&T was a willing partner in the creation of the RBOCs (baby Bells),
believing correctly that the computer revolution was the place to go, to
be achieved through their NCR acquisition. A while lot of blunders and
mismanagement later, they capped it up by acquiring TCI (the largest
cable conglomerate at that time).
The monopoly that gave us the greatness of Bell Labs also created a lack
of direction or even measure of progress in the research areas (which
were instead rife with politics), and an incompetent executive team that
had no real idea on how to build or sell products. The rumour had it
that management would reject any suggested research based product if
they did not see the potential for a billion in revenues within 5 years
of launch. Most Internet technologies would probably fall in that space
from an initial, naive estimation.
I appreciate and agree with the sentiments expressed about Bell Labs,
but if it was my money to hand out, I would, by a slight margin, favour
academic research as the recipient.
--ravi
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