Bell Labs Holmdel Is Now Mainly a Food Court | Hacker News Reader

Bell Labs Holmdel Is Now Mainly a Food Court

bell.works

26 pointsaj717 comments

It's not mainly a food court, it's owned by a fairly typical commercial real estate investment group, and is divided into rentable office space.

https://bell.works/new-jersey/work/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex

aerial view: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Labs_Holmdel.jp...

You're reading the ads. I said mostly.

A Xerox Parc alumni told me the physical structure had massive influence on the dynamics of social interaction. it is not impossible Bell Labs, and MIT's Building 29 are examples of this too. I've never been to any of them. I know the common room of many university CS departments is where you get the low-down on whats really going on. Coffee helps.

They call themselves a "metroburb", a related article on it: https://newcities.org/the-big-picture-increasing-allure-metr...

Doesn’t surprise me when you could double your salary simply moving to the west coast.

The phrases "innovation", "tech hub" and "New Jersey"... I don't think so

Do you not realize what the significance of Bell Labs is?

edit: This site is an Eero Saarinen design as well, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex

To a certain extent, both Silicon Valley and Hollywood owe their existence to being inconveniently far from New Jersey, a different circuit court, and thus more easily able to ignore the patents of the tech giants in New Jersey.

Not to mention why Raritan Township, NJ was renamed to Edison. I’m not sure sure you could make the case that anything Silicon Valley has produced has had more impact on daily life than what came out of Menlo Park a century ago.

Of course! That's why I posted it! This was the most prestigious laboratory in the world.

> The phrases "innovation", "tech hub" and "New Jersey"... I don't think so

Don't be so parochial. Who knows what the places you consider to be "tech hubs" now will be in 50 years.

I recently learned that Minnesota of all places used to be a "tech hub" during the mainframe era.

And Norwich, NY was once place to a thriving, innovative pharmaceutical company.

New Jersey still is a tech hub, but for pharmaceutical technology.

Can confirm, worked with a silly-expensive consultancy for a company with a little process-deviation-reporting-workflow-management tool (with BPMN workflow modeling, because they needed to make my life interesting); it was in New Jersey because allllll their customers were in the area.

Don't let how easy it is to make fun of New Jersey distract you from how it's an enormous hub for lucrative pharma dollars.

What places do you consider to be tech hubs?

Huh? The Transistor, Unix, Speech Recognition was all invented in NJ

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