My summer at Bell Labs (2018)

It was amazing when computers were both new and social. Limitless potential pursued through room-sided machines with the power of today’s toys. Bits and scraps like this blog capture the spirit.

https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/center127.pd... is fascinating. Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Aho, reporting to obscure people adjudged by even more obscure people to be worthy of management. It would be about 23 years before engineers would be paid much more than subway motorman with seniority and a strong union. Note also that in that era, it was de rigueur to describe the marital status of every female support person.

This is so cool. I’m a few years out of college at a major tech company and have taken to reading some books about this era. I find myself envious of the seeming purity of the time when it was all getting started, and notice how scrum boards, discussions of negotiating TC are absent in these stories.

I don’t remember an Internet without Facebook.

To me, Ritchie is a legend, Ullman was someone who wrote some of my textbooks. To hear an account of an intern working side by side with some of these people is amusingly bizarre.