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Comment by bbqmaster999 | Hacker News Reader

Antitrust was a disaster for Bell Labs, which gave us inventions like the transistor and Unix. Nothing as noteworthy after the breakup and string of acquisitions. In the same way I’m worried for all the moon shoot projects at these big companies if they are broken up. I suggest reading the Idea Factory and then see how you feel about breaking up big tech.

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Bell also forced you to rent their telephones if you wanted phone service. The old Bell was a disaster for consumers and Bell Labs does not excuse their monopolistic practices. As a counterpoint consider Xerox PARC, which brought us the GUI and Ethernet without Xerox fucking over their customers (too much).

Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.

You really find it funny that someone on HN is defending the company whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology we work on today? So maybe they charged too much for their phone service, big deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.

Somehow, it's much rarer to see someone on HN defending the government, whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology that we work on today. So maybe they charged too much taxes, bid deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.

name some foundational advances Google has made.

Throwing 100x more resources at AI ideas from the 70s isn't an foundational advance.

MapReduce, GFS and Bigtable are the foundations of big data today.

None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer Programming.

The original TOACP makes no mention of map parallelization.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

Nor the second one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art_of_Computer_Program...

Nor the third one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

I also searched for "parallel" and couldn't find any relevant passages to map parallelization.

Those are good engineering efforts, but its like building a bridge vs understanding the theory of gravity.

They are definitely not foundational in anywhere near the sense that bell labs was.

Maybe Bell Labs was only foundational due to timing?

Please tell me what amazing inventions Google funded in the past 20 years. Inventions that benefited everyone, not just Google.

Go is pretty close to being from Bell Labs, in the sense it's a continuation funded by Google of work from Bell Labs, no?

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