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Comment by Zanneth | Hacker News Reader

The ingenuity and brilliance coming from Bell Labs during that era is absolutely astonishing. Transistors, information theory, satellite communication, UNIX/C, the list goes on. These ideas unquestionably laid the foundation for modern high-tech society.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Bell Labs and the folks who worked there, “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book written on the subject. It’s not comprehensive but it’s a very inspiring read.

There has always been something very vexing about Bell Labs’ legacy though. They had everything they needed to start the personal computing revolution: engineers, scientists, equipment, a nationwide telephone network for god’s sake. What happened?

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Bell Systems was precluded from entering many markets (and forced to offer its patents to anyone) because of the 1956 consent decree that permitted its ongoing monopoly in telecommunications.

A formal study of some of the consequences:

https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/how_antitrust...

I heartily second the recommendation for "The Idea Factory"! I'm currently reading this book and aside from the seriously impressive run of successes, the characters are really quite amusing at times too. E.g., Shannon built a desktop calculator that operated using Roman numerals only ("THROBAC") in order to amuse himself. And some of the whimsical creations were pretty impressive in their own right. E.g., his maze-solving mouse "Theseus" learned the maze layout on progressive runs through the maze by using relay-based logic.

I'll happily "third" the recommendation for The Idea Factory. It really is an inspiring read, and I expect many firms could find some actionable takeaways to apply within their own organizations, even today. Yes, Bell Labs had some specific circumstances that allowed them some luxuries that other firms may not have, but their success is not as simple as "they had a monopoly, herp derp".

As others have mentioned Xerox PARC, I also recommend the "PARC counterpart" to this book titled "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik. It was a beautiful summer read, full of amusing anecdotes and written in a laid back style while still conveying lots of information about the environment in PARC.

Turing’s Cathedral was an interesting book on the computing origins topic too, and chronographically it felt like it segwayed into The Idea Factory well.

Bell Labs continued doing foundational research unfettered by marketability for a long time after the conventional story has them buried and gone. (To pick a personal favourite, B. F. Logan's work on Click Modulation is a bizarro-world stumble through arcane mathematics that pops out somewhere unexpected and valuable in the field of signal processing.)

Unfortunately, a lot of this research was buried in microfiche in university basements as Bell Labs' legacy was traded from company to company without a viable distribution mechanism. As a result, although this work is now all available on-line (sadly not in open-access form), there are still more forgotten gems in there than many researchers realize.

They had a monopoly and an innovators dilemma.

Even though that brought the lab's demise, its then-younger staff and their mentees continued their work at other organizations, including many at Google.

Xerox Parc had early personal computers and developed GUI/mouse driven software with email, word processor and paint programs and an IDE meant for kids to be able to learn and use. But it was some college dropouts in their garages that brought it to the masses.

One of the more surprising things I remember them researching (in their earlier years) was different wood to be used for telephone poles. IIRC they ran experiments for several years to see what type of wood lasted the longest in different weather conditions. All this to drive down costs in the long term.

Same thing that happened with Xerox...

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