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What companies in the modern day are like working at Bell Labs along the important dimensions? (E.g., impact, colleague quality, etc.) Asking for a friend. I suspect the old Pivotal Labs was like this, if you can speak enough enterprise-ese to figure it out.
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What companies in the modern day are like working at Bell Labs along the important dimensions? (E.g., impact, colleague quality, etc.) Asking for a friend. I suspect the old Pivotal Labs was like this, if you can speak enough enterprise-ese to figure it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I guess the author of the blog post agrees, since he talks about "its demise in the 1980s". Probably a lot of things have changed since then and honestly I am kinda curious about it.
EH, once ma bell got broken up, not much of interest happened. My dad worked out of their Naperville office until it closed down. By that point it was less R&D and more, “how do we make money”.
That's putting it harshly of course, but it's probably notable that the only places you might find something approaching a team or department like the Bell Labs of old are large incumbents in fields like Apple or Microsoft. If you're a smaller competitor or in a highly competitive space, you don't have the luxury of being able to spend large chunks of money and people on R&D that may never produce anything useful or salable. In theory you might be able to get something like this out of academia, but then you run into the publish or perish mindsets.
I wonder if one way the states and federal government could encourage development in towns and areas that are dying as the world consolidates and small towns lack opportunity would be to subsidize these sorts of non-competitive R&D spaces in those otherwise undesirable living areas. A sort of multi pronged subsidy, to both the workers (discounted home loans, dedicated public transport), to the local industries (grants or loans to builders in the area to build homes and infrastructure) and to the companies themselves (tax incentives, short term subsidizing of salaries etc), and in exchange the public and the government gets the results of the research perhaps under reduced term patents or special licensing deals.
It's no longer about the engineers - it's all about the shareholders.
Too young to have been there, and too young not to take that type of progress that came from Bell Labs for granted, - I now realize that 20th century progress came, not from natural competition, but from the strong forcing function of utility-guided free research. After 20 years of hoping for a Bell Labs to magically show up again, I now work to emulate this culture but with a focus on energy systems that has the sam…
It’s a great pity such a great institution ended up in its current diminishing state due to a series of events related to the divestiture.. see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System . This makes one wonder …
Although some of the success of the old bell labs was because it was a monopoly, so it could afford long term investment. It’s a different environment now.
Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a little. There may have also been additional operating company funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed administrative software for their use.
The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free environment is incorrect. In the development organizations there was fierce competition between developers of analog versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial cable systems, space division versus time-division switching, etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure there was considerable competition for resources, funding, and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I guess the author of the blog post agrees, since he talks about "its demise in the 1980s". Probably a lot of things have changed since then and honestly I am kinda curious about it.
EH, once ma bell got broken up, not much of interest happened. My dad worked out of their Naperville office until it closed down. By that point it was less R&D and more, “how do we make money”.
One thing unmentioned we benefited from as kids in the 80s was super kick ass technical book stores in Naperville and Wheaton.
I was sad seeing the big red zero logo of Lucent on the new building across the street, and the withering of the place.
It's no longer about the engineers - it's all about the shareholders.
Right. Because organizations like the AT&T monopoly when you paid $1/minute for phone calls and couldn't connect your own equipment didn't have shareholders. This kind of idealization of the past gets old.
An AT&T handset could be used to beat up a burglar and then still be used to call the police. They were, to say the least, indestructible.
Nokia phones were that way for a bit (I forget what model number) where you could have them fly off the roof of your car at speed, and find them run over twice and still working (assuming the battery stayed in).
The latest iPhone flying out of a plane "window" and then landing still running and unbroken was an impressive moment and harkened back to earlier times.
The break up of att lead to a race to the bottom on handsets, they were disposable in a bad way for a while.