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Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

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Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#31

Post by lawrenceyan »

quantum_state wrote: post #19
aborsy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah … the question is: where would the next Bell Labs come from for long term scientific endeavors? The national labs? But the funding there can be quite volatile … The universities? But it could run the risk of being too academic. There is a need for an environment like the old Bell Labs, with problems and opportunities coming from practical matters, yet with folks who are interested in solving the problems but not…

Google (Alphabet) is the successor to Bell Labs.

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#32

Post by owisd »

ghaff wrote: post #26
octopusRex wrote: post #25

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.

AT&T had shareholders, but they also had a public interest mandate imposed on them by antitrust regulations, so couldn’t operate on the modern notion that shareholder value is all that matters.

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#34

Post by CharlesW »

pram wrote: post #9

ATT has a bunch of Bell Labs stuff on their Youtube channel, it's all a pro watch. This is one of my favorites, about people submitting their code to get processed at their computing center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64 Watching it made me realize a lot of batch-esque things like Hadoop and Spark aren't too far off, just more automated.

"…2 million bytes of core available for programmer use."

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#35

Post by pjmlp »

ghaff wrote: post #26
octopusRex wrote: post #25

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.

Not only that, was AT&T not forbiddenn to profit from Bell Labs, UNIX would have been a commercial OS right from the start, with at very different outcome than offering source tapes at symbolic price turned out to be.

As seen by their BSD lawsuit right after they were allowed to sell UNIX.

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #31
quantum_state wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah … the question is: where would the next Bell Labs come from for long term scientific endeavors? The national labs? But the funding there can be quite volatile … The universities? But it could run the risk of being too academic. There is a need for an environment like the old Bell Labs, with problems and opportunities coming from practical matters, yet with folks who are interested in solving the problems but not…

Google (Alphabet) is the successor to Bell Labs.

[deleted]

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#37

Post by fuzzfactor »

lokimedes wrote: post #7
REDS1736 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up; the "About Morten" page of your website is just lorem ipsum

Thanks, yes, we are pretty early setting this up, you can find me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skaersoe/

Took a look at your website and I really admire your approach.

Looking forward to some updates as things firm up.

I would say natural competition has been around for a long time, and can act as an obstacle to natural co-operation. That co-operation seems to be so much more difficult to establish and maintain. But when you get strong individuals who are advanced in so many different directions, and let them keep going, it could take time associating together before some fruitful common ground can be staked out, but there's nothing else like it.

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#39

Post by kjkjadksj »

zer00eyz wrote: post #30
ghaff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was a charm to old AT&T. One that we didn't see again till peak Nokia. 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 stay…

That iPhone got supremely lucky. They stopped making them strong after the 5s body design, that was the last one with a full metal back as well as the screen fully protected on edge. On the next generation “bar of soap” body the glass bulges out so when you drop it, often it lands glass first right on the edge and just shatters.

Re: Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)

#40

Post by WorldMaker »

sllabres wrote: post #11

I loved the Bell Labs Technical Journal (then AT&T Technical Journal) for as long as it was freely available in the 90s. A lot of the content revolved around technologies like SS7 or the large AT&T ESS switches, which were not relevant to me. But there were always very interesting ideas in the papers which let me think a bit outside the box. I remember reports like "The AT&T Switching Evolution Challenge", "Software…

Entirely a tangential aside, but related to SS7, so maybe a fun aside:

I got nerd sniped by a Facebook meme joking on a Gen Z "text chat" caption to a "Gone with the Wind" still that said "tbh bae idgaf" in place of the infamous Clark Gable line and how incomprehensible that seemed and might be to past generations. All the individual pieces existed in 1940 when "Gone with the Wind" released to figure it out (TBH was already well established as an acronym, babe as a term of endearment was too though the bae form is a very recent twist, IDGAF was easily explainable/guessable as an acronym, especially to anyone familiar with military acronyms at the time and/or the quote in context). That lead to the idea of writing a short story about what if Bell Labs accidentally got that MMS message in 1940, which has lead to fun micro-research like some of the basics of SS7 (the true backwards compatibility point of no return for MMS) and how much Bell Labs might recognize SS7 from the 1940's era of basically "SS3.5", and how much any of it might look like AT&T technology to them if they were staring at printouts. I'm absolutely taking fictional liberties with it as the answer is probably that SS7 would be a massive stretch for 1940s tech even with IBM's involvement (which makes for a silly semi-cooperative antagonist of sorts in the story). UTF-8's ASCII compatibility (emoji are a running undecodable debate in the story), and Unix's epoch timestamps would probably feel familiar to AT&T/Bell Labs (even if they probably would not have guessed the epoch start date of 1970 from 1940). I even felt like giving IBM a small "win", for the sake of interesting fiction, in guessing that IBM might have helped design JPEG (they did, in the 1990s), though I'm currently assuming that JPEG would have been undecodable in 1940 (even the math for wavelet compression was decades away) and 40s IBM would probably be upset JPEG encodes small bits of ASCII and Unix epoch timestamps. (40s IBM in my story was also upset by "new phone who dis?" Our world really does kind of look like "What if AT&T did win at computers like their 50s/60s ads thought they might?" but for many of the wrong reasons and twists neither AT&T nor IBM would have expected.)

It's been a fun, silly story to write (I start with AT&T Bell Labs/IBM combined spending a bunch of time decoding a "u up?") with the excuse to at least do some light dives into the crazy backwards compatibility stories of some of the technology we just sort of take for granted today.

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