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Comment by machrider | Hacker News Reader

Does anything remotely like Bell Labs exist today? Is it simply not possible with everyone tightening their belts?

If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel...

Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?

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The Viewpoints Research Institute fits the bill: http://www.vpri.org/

They want to replace the entire software industry, since it's all a huge hack (especially the 100m+ SLOC codebases that are way too common). Goal: a full GUI system (from kernel to applications) in 20k SLOC. Take a look at the progress reports they've made. They claim a 200 line TCP, 800 line graphics system (apparently comparable to Cairo), and lots of other neat stuff.

> They claim a 200 line TCP, 800 line graphics system (apparently comparable to Cairo)

That's impressive (and hard to believe). Are more informations about this available somewhere?

There's a blog post about it here: http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software...

I've always felt BBN [1] was pretty close, not the size of Bell labs, but tons of really awesome research. They've been purchased and sold many times (now with Raytheon) but they are the company behind the original arpanet and, despite many transitions, they've always seemed to preserve their culture (Leo Beranek, nearly 100 now, still stops by from time to time) and passion for research .

[1] http://www.bbn.com/

Microsoft Research?

And it expands into many fields

Absolutely. Just for the curious, though off-topic, here's a link to the various things MSR is involved with: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/areas.aspx.

MS Research is quite good. Done lots of fundamental research work.

MSR may be the top organization in computer science today:

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7...

Looks like IBM is quite far up there in terms of publications as well.

We keep our selves busy.

Xerox PARC, IBM Research, MS Research, Google Research (don't confuse Google Labs with research). There are plenty more.

Isn't PARC pretty much a consultancy now?

It's also independent of Xerox, though a wholly-own subsidiary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

Woah woah woah, you seem to be confusing "small experiments Google hosts publicly at labs.google.com" with R&D. Since your wiki link seems to be about publishing academic articles, here's a list of academic article produced by places that are not Bell Labs: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx

The software industry is also producing patents at an absurb rate, which is another byproduct of research (theoretically).

Yeah, I guess it was a little off-topic. I realize they're different things, but shutting down Google Labs made me think of the state of R&D in general.

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