What made Bell Labs special? (2012) [pdf]

That brought back memories for me, I worked there from 1978 - 1984. It was special and I agree with a lot of what the author said, but I would also highlight the people that ran the place. My boss was amazing, too long to list all the reasons but never forgot him. It takes a special type of person to manage highly skilled technical people effectively. I think there are some places like that today (maybe Google, I don't know first hand only from friends that work there). But in my view, that is the key, creating an environment that those types special people are able to thrive in. Bell Labs did that, maybe it was because they were a monopoly that they had that luxury, but I think there was more to it than that.

"At Bell, the financial motive was not grants but contributing to the company’s product lines. This seems reasonable to me, both because telephone service is a public good and because, as Gertner notes, the challenges of improving phone service motivated technical advances that benefited other areas as well."

The thing is AT&T was the monopoly of telecommunication service in the US back then. When Paul Baran went to present his "packet switching" (which is also independently studied and proposed by UK's Donlad Davies, and both combined with Leonard Kleinrock's theoretical analysis became packet switching in the development of the "Internet") to AT&T, AT&T laughed it off and said no, mainly because AT&T did not want to adopt the digital communication and wanted to maintain its monopoly. The engineers at AT&T (not Bell Labs) pretty much said to Baran he lacked the fundamental understanding of how communication system works. Just to be fair, at work, in the beginning RAND Corp engineers were also not convinced, but nonetheless Baran was able to get enough support and appreciation from his fellow coworkers and the company's management that he demoed to AT&T.

This is a story of a classic corporate engineer who has the "know-it-all" mindset vs the classic researcher/engineer who appreciate challenges and differences.

I recommend reading "When Wizards Stay Up Late".

I think companies which allow some degree of hacker/research culture really do benefit from the openness and innovation. Google's 20% (although I read most engineers don't get any free time at all and 20% was not a formal policy, and 20% was just a spontaneous thing in the early stage of Google), FB's internal Hackathon crated some of the most-used features/products at the respective company. I think another modern example is Stripe, I consistently heard something great about its culture.

Someone asked the head of Bell Labs that question once. He answered "Consistent funding".

This is a little off topic but maybe it highlights the sort of people that worked there.

When I was an undergrad I had some Unix question so I emailed Dennis Ritchie (...!research!dmr) and asked him about it, we went back and forth a bit. Finally I asked him for his phone number and he sent it, I called him and we quickly sorted out my question. Over the years, I've called him a number of times. I suspect that if he were still with us he'd remember me, he seemed to enjoy chatting and passing on his knowledge.

I had to think about to remember if it was just email or if we talked live. My phone database put that straight:

    $ call ritchie
    Dennis Ritchie                  908-582-3770 (W/bell labs)

I was just a kid in college, nobody important, I hadn't contributed anything of significance to the field. Yet he was happy to take time out of his day and share his knowledge. I've had the same experience with bwk, I had some ideas I wanted to hack into awk, emailed him and told him what I was thinking, not too long later I open up my mailbox and there is a tarball of ~bwk/awk, all the source, the docs, and the book in english and french.

Bell Labs was something special, pretty much everyone that I've met/talked to who worked there were really nice people and more than happy to share their knowledge. They only cared that you wanted to learn (and that you had a clue). Smart (enough) guy who wants to learn more? Sure, here's my phone number.

BTW, there is mailing list for old Unix hackers that I enjoy, if you like that sort of thing you might check out http://www.tuhs.org/ - it's got former Bell Labs people who comment on stuff pretty regularly. It's pretty nerdy, there is a long thread going right now about old Unix vulnerabilities (eg, passing the right negative number to kill(2) would get you root) but I find it fascinating. Another thread that's going on is why C choose to pass arrays by reference but everything else by value; another is a discussion of C's type syntax (not a lot of love for the pointer binding to the variable, people wish that "char* p1, p2" got you two pointers, not a pointer and a char.)

The breakup of AT&T likely made the world we live in today possible, but it also killed the innovation engine that came up with much of the underlying technology that the world we live in today was built on.

Our local chapter of Papers We Love has been looking for articles sort of like this one but a little longer (maybe 3-10 pages), on either Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. Any suggestions?

(We had a lively discussion on the 1945 Vannevar Bush essay, As We May Think https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... and see this as a continuation.)

I think that everyone should read The Idea Factory, for a reason similar to the reason that everyone should learn Lisp. Bell Labs no longer exists, and you will never get to work there; but you can learn how research and supervision could be done, and that will help you route around whatever damage keeps the handbrake on at the place where you do work.

Many years ago I recall seeing an image of the office layout where it showed Dennis Ritchie's office being located near Ken Thompson's office (I believe). I'm unable to locate it now, though.

That must've been an interesting work environment.

For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory". It's a history of Bell Labs, focusing both on the biographies of the engineers and also a meta story about how you create an organization that consistently produces impactful innovation.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

Post divestiture i thought I was hot stuff with my cps and math degree. Only to find out I was the dumbest in my BL group.

I remember people's email was their first name. I had to use first initial and last name.

Eventually I moved to sales/marketing for consumer side. Consumer was fighting MCI and share loss, looking for help from the Labs.

They created something that virtually eliminated all background noise (Feldspar??) but it was not used/promoted afaik.

Then someone suggested that all AT&T long distance customers be given an emai account: their number @ att.com (2015551212@att.com eg) aol was still mailing 3.5 floppies

There was really no vehicle to speed up the product side....

They got to spent 2% of company revenue on research. In modern times shareholders would probably get furious at doing research.

There was the thread here not so long ago about XEROX Park, and it had pretty detailed discussion. In the end it came down to funding.