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

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

#91

Post by fortran77 »

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.

Worked for them for about 10 years. Fun place, but I'm not sure it'll ever be like the old days where research was done for research's sake. So many things are now off-the-shelf, and not much is invented in house.

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

#92

Post by vineyardmike »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #85
esafak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How frequently do you think most people make such transactions?

I don’t know about individuals, but there are quite a few people exposed to transactions costs via 401k/IRA/taxpayer funded pensions/etc.

I haven't incurred a trade in a 401k in a decade. Sub-milli liquidity is absolutely unnecessary for me.

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

#93

Post by nextos »

esafak wrote: post #65
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't that replacement called F#?

It's more like the predecessor to Dafny, which is still research-oriented.

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

#94

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

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…

Ah, is it possible to share stories from early MSFT days?

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

#95

Post by nextos »

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?

Perhaps Altos Labs (aging). Perhaps also Isomorphic Labs (protein design) will also become such a place. Both are still quite new.

Microsoft Research is also pivoting into this area.

mRNA designs are still a bit primitive. Moderna and BioNTech resemble corporations, rather than skunkworks.

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

#96

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #54
dleink wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Read it twice and really envy these guys! Nowadays there is far less such work and they almost all requre doctors.

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

#97

Post by miniatureape »

ioblomov wrote: post #68
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…

The whole complex (immortalized as Lumon HQ in Severance ) is landmarked so presumably it can’t be messed with too much. Even apart from the historical significance, it’s a masterpiece of mid-century design. Its architect, Eero Saarinen, also did the St. Louis Arch and, my personal favorite, the TWA terminal at JFK, which reopened as a hotel in 2019. If you’re ever stuck on a layover there, do check it out! https://e…

The building in that show is the Holmdel location. Murray Hill is a different campus.

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

#98

Post by hnu234 »

jakderrida wrote: post #90
ioblomov wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I’m not saying Shannon never walked the halls of Murray Hill, his publishing A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948 meant that he was working at the lab’s previous location in the West Village… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Laboratories_Building

1966?? So, like, pretty much all the world-changing, paradigm-shifting revelations were in West Village? So, while working with Verizon, they falsely claimed it to be Basking Ridge, NJ (which they bought and boasted as the Brains of Bell to invoke a symbolic victory of sorts) until I found out they were either lying or swindled and it was another place in Jersey. Yet again, I find out from you that it was just anothe…

> 1966?? So, like, pretty much all the world-changing, paradigm-shifting revelations were in West Village?

No. Unix, C, C++, etc were in nj.

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

#99

Post by fuzztester »

eatonphil wrote: post #7

The new home is still NJ: New Brunswick. > When Nokia’s research arm, Nokia Bell Labs, said in early December the company will move out of the Murray Hill campus over the next five years to relocate to a new tech hub being built in New Brunswick, the announcement spurred an outpouring of memories online from current and former employees. > Bell Labs’ new headquarters will be located at the HELIX innovation center in…

>Murray Hill campus

Wow. I remember reading in some of the early books about C or Unix (such as K&R or K&P), the words "Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey" in one of the early pages, such as the Introduction, Preface or copyright page.

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

#100

Post by fuzztester »

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 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.

>Really grand. I can’t imagine what it was like in its heyday.

You may have seen this already, but sharing it for others:

Here is one image from that time, which I had seen sometime earlier:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Thompson_(sitting)_...

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