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Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

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Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#21

Post by bogomipz »

rb808 wrote: post #13
bogomipz wrote: post #10

Also central to New Jersey's weight as an innovation hub was Princeton University - where Alan Turning met and studied under Alonzo Church.[1]. Also worth mentioning is the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J where Kurt Gödel remained a faculty member until his death in 1978.[2] Alfred Einstein also spent the last two years of his life working at the Institute. Imagine the conversations Einstein and Gode…

John von Neumann worked in Princeton, I didn't realize the von Neumann architecture was aka the Princeton architecture. Of course Einstein lived and worked in Princeton too.

Wow. Indeed, I did not know this - he was visiting professor for four years and also ended up at the Institute for Advanced Study:

"In 1929 von Neumann accepted an invitation to come to Princeton as a visiting professor for one term. Given a continuing half-time appointment the following year, he spent one term each year in Princeton and one in Germany until 1933 when, at the age of 30, he accepted appointment as the youngest and one of the first professors in the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study. In 1937 he became a United States citizen."

source: http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/von_neumann_...

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#22

Post by hari_seldon_ »

rb808 wrote: post #13
bogomipz wrote: post #10

Also central to New Jersey's weight as an innovation hub was Princeton University - where Alan Turning met and studied under Alonzo Church.[1]. Also worth mentioning is the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J where Kurt Gödel remained a faculty member until his death in 1978.[2] Alfred Einstein also spent the last two years of his life working at the Institute. Imagine the conversations Einstein and Gode…

John von Neumann worked in Princeton, I didn't realize the von Neumann architecture was aka the Princeton architecture. Of course Einstein lived and worked in Princeton too.

Many people on HN seem to forget that many strides in computer science, computer architecture, and mathematics came from schools that don't start with an "S" and are from outside of the Bay Area. I think it is more that the definition of how you measure innovation has shifted over time -- now it is based on how many dollars are raised for your venture vs. actual strides being made in academic fields of study.

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#24

Post by TFortunato »

ghaff wrote: post #15
walshemj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wasn't it called Route 128 ?

Route 128 is in Massachusetts. (The term isn't really used any more because it doesn't correspond to where many/most companies are actually located--it only did to some degree even when the term was in vogue.)

Yep...seems most of what I hear when people from Massachusetts (myself included) when we talk about where we work to outsiders is either "In Boston", or "Right Outside Boston / Near Boston / The Boston Area" (For anything east of Worcester it seems, haha)

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#25

Post by aswanson »

throwawaymanbot wrote: post #18

According to wikipedia, it also has more engineers per square meter than any state in the US. Not quite the trashy state people are led to believe it is. Now that NYC is not affordable for startups, NJ will become a perfectly respectable tech/Start up hub. And good for it.

Nah, Jersey is done. The same 1950s attitudes/laws that caused it to lose the industry are still there. That's why it's tech scene consists mostly of big doofy defense contractors and Comcast.

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#26

Post by Akarnani »

Even as Silicon Valley was still in its infancy, a group of organizations including Bell, MCI, GM, and others hired Fred Terman from Stanford to make NJ more like what Silicon Valley (NJ and SV share a ton of similarities, i did a tedx talk about it below [1]) but Terman was unsuccessful. He pointed to how Princeton was not focused enough on applied science the way Stanford was. East coast politics and stock market downturn also hindered his efforts.

Also, don't forget Fort Monmouth, which was across the county, employed an equal number of scientists and was responsible for nearly as many inventions as Bell Labs (much classified). It was the home of the Army's software and signal operations. Just like Silicon Valley, the military kickstarted the world's most productive innovation cores.

New Jersey had (and continues to have) the richest concentration of scientists in the United States. Monmouth County and the Princeton had, for a very long time, the kind of serendipity that makes Silicon Valley so special—that you can walk down the street and bump into a bunch of engineers and VCs while walking your dog and strike up a conversation.

State politics in NJ, unfortunately, doesn't nurture these institutions and the ecosystem has grown weaker. It breaks my heart that Bell Labs is a mall and Fort Monmouth lays fallow when it should be bid out to universities to become the Stanford of the East—the applied sciences university that Fred Terman dreamed about.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2LbuqoNGGI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Monmouth

[3] http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/06/...

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#27

Post by Nav_Panel »

jballanc wrote: post #17

Well, New Jersey is still the only state to have a programming language named for it (SML/NJ, in case you were curious)...

SML/NJ is just a compiler/programming environment for SML[1], not a whole language on its own. Still impressive.

1: http://www.smlnj.org/smlnj.html

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#28

Post by HarryHirsch »

flexie wrote: post #19
netcan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to abuse for both parties.

Yes, but your employer pays you some $100,000 for what is most people's best 8 hours daily. In most cases, whatever an employer did code in his spare time, which is related to the employer's business, would be inspired by or downright copied from whatever he or his coworkers did in the office. If you don't like it, you are free to accept another job offer or to quit and make your own business out of that thing you we…

Difficult to tell if this is satire or not.

Here is a Route 128 story: back then in the mid-80s Elias Corey employed Stewart Rubenstein to work on LHASA, his retrosynthesis program. Remember that Corey was awarded the Nobel not for total synthesis but for automation of retrosynthesis. Rubenstein was approached by a colleague from David Evans' group of he could also automate structure drawing. This was the beginning of Chemdraw.

Corey (it's well known that he is an arsehole) claimed the Chemdraw IP because he paid Rubenstein's salary and Evans supported him in the suit against Corey. (Evans is an arsehole as well, but a different kind.) Rubenstein won the suit because he could prove that off-the-clock he worked on a Macintosh and on the clock presumably on a PDP-11 or somesuch.

Should the Coreys of Massachusetts be able to claim IP unrelated to employment because they pay your salary and own you 24/7?

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#29

Post by bogomipz »

hari_seldon_ wrote: post #22
rb808 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John von Neumann worked in Princeton, I didn't realize the von Neumann architecture was aka the Princeton architecture. Of course Einstein lived and worked in Princeton too.

Many people on HN seem to forget that many strides in computer science, computer architecture, and mathematics came from schools that don't start with an "S" and are from outside of the Bay Area. I think it is more that the definition of how you measure innovation has shifted over time -- now it is based on how many dollars are raised for your venture vs. actual strides being made in academic fields of study.

I find your comment a bit gratuitous. These seminal figures come up somewhat regularly on HN and it's no secret that these great minds hailed from Austria, Britain, Hungary, Germany etc.

Re: Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

#30

Post by brosirmandude »

Interesting seeing this story this morning, my company recently moved into the old Bell Labs building. Now called Bell Works, it does actually look like it's going to become a hub of new tech companies in the area.

It's pretty humbling to walk into this giant building every day knowing some of the amazing things that were invented here.

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