The demise of Bell Labs is saddening from both a physics and computer science perspective. It feels like all too often, large corporations like AT&T and GE, once huge innovation engines, have been dismantled due to greed and incompetence, with outstanding institutions like Bell Labs left by the wayside. Hopefully, Google et al will pick up the slack and foster these kinds of environments.

Hmmm, who's "greed and incompetence" forced the dismantling of AT&T?

Could it be the Federal Government, which forced the 1984 consent agreement and the breakup, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that pushed the process all the further?

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying something to the effect of "We have the best telephone system in the world, but we can fix that."

It was aggressive business practices that squashed competition such as MCI and an attitude by the leaders of AT&T that felt the risk of antitrust action against them was an acceptable business risk. Information from the MCI case was shared with the antitrust effort and helped lead to their breakup.

True (although I cringe at using the world "agressive" WRT to the old AT&T) ... but was a breakup, and one of that nature, the right solution?

A problem here is that MCI's business directly attacked the heart of the AT&T business model, which had long distance subsidizing local telephone service. They had to viciously defend the former.

The breakup's solution was the Federal Subscriber Line Charge.

With respect to "aggressive" their conduct in the face of Carterphone and MCI was to take no quarter: http://www.chtlj.org/sites/default/files/media/articles/v025...

The connotations of "implacable" are more to my taste.

I understand what you are saying, but considering a breakup due to antitrust action an acceptable business risk being agressive. IBM, in its own antitrust tribulations, did not feel that the risk of breakup was an acceptable business risk, and many observers felt that enabled them to stay as one.

I'm a bit historically confused. The "demise of Bell Labs" wasn't due to the breakup, right?

I thought they continued on for a long time after that. After all, didn't Bell Labs convert into Lucent just 7 or 8 years ago?

Yeah, I am not sure that one can argue that the eventual demise of Bell Labs was caused by the divestiture except, perhaps, in that AT&T would have remained a stronger company longer had it not happened. It seems more likely that they were simply the victim of the relentless focus on short term ROI that has characterized big business for the last decade(s).

I'm not even sure you can blame that on the company, considering that it's the shareholders who fundamentally encourage that behavior.

The shareholders were entirely happy with the existing setup prior to 1984 ... wasn't AT&T about or the most widely held stock at the time? You can't invoke their putative behavior afterwords to justify the breakup.

I'm thoroughly convinced that the switch from a regulated monopoly to a set of "normal" companies destroyed the basis that allowed Bell Labs to do its thing.

And it destroyed the scale: after the 1984 consent degree, AT&T was a much smaller company and the RBOCs set up their own quasi-parallel Bellcore, but that did little or no basic research as I recall.

Factor in that one of the prior anti-trust agreements required AT&T to license at a reasonable rate all the output of Bell Labs (e.g. the transistor). And that they used its output among other things to justify their business model.

Look, the 1984 consent agreement may or may not have been a good thing, but we can't pretend it didn't come without some serious costs, and everyone at the time who I respected said that Bell Labs would be one of those. I was an early 20s callow youth at the time, but I agreed as well.

Several of them (Thompson, Pike, Presotto, Weinberger, Feldman) are already working for Google. The list could be longer - those are just the ones I know about.

I'm somewhat amused to find out that Bjarne Stroustrup and Ken Thompson worked next door to each other after reading the interview with Thompson in Coders at Work.

Dr.Holzmann (who currently heads reliability group at JPL) notes: "from the 30-some people shown on this map, just a few remained to witness the final disappearance of center 1127 from the bell labs org charts in august 2005: rae mclellan, howard trickey (since moved to google) and dennis ritchie (now retired). one by one, the others all found a safe haven elsewhere."

The best part is the Unix room, which still exists. It's a great slice of history, and they still do active Plan 9 development there.

No mens room? That explains a lot.

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