Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

nj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#51

Post by dleink »

tomcam wrote: post #46
lgkk wrote: post #37

I have walked those halls and let me tell you it feels spooky in a good way to know a lot of groundbreaking work was done there. During the time I was on campus it was mostly empty. There were old computers still inside some rooms. I felt like I had been transported to the 80s or 90s in one hall and some halls even more decades in the past. Really grand. I can’t imagine what it was like in its heyday.

I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself. I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the m…

Any recommendations for books on the history of computing from that period?

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#52

Post by tomcam »

polishdude20 wrote: post #45
tomcam wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself. I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the m…

I wonder where can you find those types of places currently? Places developing the next mRNA vaccines for cancer? Places developing AI? Electric cars?

I think that if you have a PhD in the right field and enough hip publications that many of the FAANG companies still have research teams like that operating in a diminished capacity. It appears to me that many of these positions have been replaced by administrators who are more interested in hiring to a specific set of demographics.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#53

Post by dleink »

dsgnr wrote: post #4
user_7832 wrote: post #2

I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.

As a freelance product designer I'm always learning and always excited about work. There are so many interesting companies working on so many interesting problems.

What takes up most of your time? Do you work with vendors to create and then produce the product or just do the design phase?

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#54

Post by NegativeLatency »

dleink wrote: post #51
tomcam wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself. I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the m…

Any recommendations for books on the history of computing from that period?

Not Microsoft but an enjoyable account from that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#55

Post by tomcam »

dleink wrote: post #51
tomcam wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a nostalgic person, but for some reason I wish irrationally that that Murray Hill building could be preserved as is. I read so much about of it in the history of computing, and just like (from the pictures) the building interior itself so much I just feel like I missed out on some thing not to have been there myself. I was lucky enough to work at Microsoft in building 2, one of 8 matching buildings from the m…

Any recommendations for books on the history of computing from that period?

Maybe “Fire in the Valley“? I learned to program in the mid-1980s and learned about the culture from dozens of magazines that were published contemporaneously. I didn’t live in Silicon Valley and thought I had pretty much missed the boat so I spent thousands a year in early 1990s dollars to keep up. Then I got to move to Redmond, Washington and actually live it. Working with people I had literally read about was every bit as good as I hoped.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#57

Post by jebarker »

user_7832 wrote: post #2

I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.

Disney Imagineering? I have no direct experience but I'm continually impressed by the technical innovations they make public and the effects they manage to achieve in their products.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#58

Post by user_7832 »

jebarker wrote: post #57
user_7832 wrote: post #2

I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.

Disney Imagineering? I have no direct experience but I'm continually impressed by the technical innovations they make public and the effects they manage to achieve in their products.

Thanks, that sounds interesting.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#59

Post by potatolicious »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #47
whimsicalism wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any prestige research lab - MS, Google, OAI, etc.

I'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do. Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCo…

Eh, I don't think today's scene is altogether that different from back then. In every case you have a research organization tied to an immensely profitable main enterprise. The vast majority of the work force works on the "product" side and only a small number of researchers are doing blue sky stuff.

This describes Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, as well as modern counterparts like MSR and DeepMind. As always, only a very small portion of the work force gets to do blue sky stuff - the rest have to do the "mundane" bits of making money.

Let's not be fooled by rose-tinted glasses here - even in its heyday Bell Labs was small fraction of the overall Bell operations, and likewise Xerox Parc an extremely prestigious but yet small slice of the overall enterprise.

Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home

#60

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

esafak wrote: post #50
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Research, though it has a reputation for coming up with great ideas that somehow never end-up in a shipping Microsoft product.

For some that's a plus!

For me a negative:

If I remember correctly, MSR worked on a practical implementation of Code-Contracts for C# which incorporated the (all-important) compile-time verification of method preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants (without the need for hand-written refinement-types, which is how we do things today): as I understand it, the compile-time part of system could support any assertion represented as a pure-function - think of it as C#'s take on Ada's assertions, improved tenfold, and it even shipped for a now-unsupported older version of C# and .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/debug-tra...

...and it was axed in .NET Core back in 2016 and hasn't been seen since: https://github.com/microsoft/CodeContracts/issues/409

Had Microsoft put more backing behind it, then C# could present itself as a language to supplant Ada in safety-critical applications, and replace C/C++ in other applications.

I have hope the feature will come back one-day - there are whole slews of bugs that can be eliminated (such as when passing EF entity types around with unintentionally null member-properties).

Post reply on HN