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Comment by jshaqaw | Hacker News Reader

Bell Labs in its prime was a marvel of human civilization. But let’s admit the economic conditions which made it possible. Pre antitrust Bell was an absolute monopoly. They could afford science projects with no economic returns because they were insulated from any economic pressures.

The public paid for Bell Labs through high monopoly rents. Want Google to have a Bell Labs then designate it the nation’s sole internet monopoly (which I’m not really advocating and nobody else would either).

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And yet it is the opposite fact, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, which lead to such labs. Most big companies had big R&D efforts during the mid-20th Century, and that was because the government was unusually aggressive in its anti-monopoly efforts. Big companies couldn't simply buy small, innovative startups. Mergers were less common, and the government examined each for any possible threat to competition. Buying an up-and-coming competitor, to limit competition, was strictly forbidden. So if you wanted to be innovative, you had to build a big lab, and do all the innovation yourself.

Because of strict regulations on Ma Bell, Unix was free with all the source code. Universities would request a copy and Ken would send a magtape.

And so it began.

It’s not like Ma Bell had any competitors they could buy, even if they wanted to. Because they were a complete monopoly. And despite this supposed strong anti-monopoly enforcement, they milked that monopoly for decades.

But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.

C, UNIX, radio astronomy, cellular networks, the transistor, integrated circuits, the laser, photovoltaic cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, super resolution microscopy, optical tweezers, error-correcting codes, fibre optic networks...

Seriously, when you list it all out it sounds like a reasonable trade.

The question isn't whether those things are nice, it's whether they wouldn't have been developed as fast in a competitive environment.

(Personally, I think just based on human nature that competition is anti-innovative in the long run, but I can't prove anything either way.)

The question is what we lost because we did those things.

We know what happened, we don't know what alternative histories would have been like. We don't know if they would have been better or worse.

It's not a perfect answer, but we can look at other industrialized countries where nothing like Bell Labs existed.

An easy citation would be CERN. They gave us the WWW, but then CERN is a monopoly in its own right, given that no one else has similar facilities, similar requirements, or a comparable base of talent to draw from.

Other than CERN, I'm drawing a blank here. Examples, anyone?

I would argue we have examples now: Google Research, Deepmind, MSR, IBM Research, AT&T Labs, FAIR...

I would argue that all their combined achievements don't add up to Bell Labs'. (IBM Research Zurich as a couple of Nobels I think). Certainly at least one reason is that these labs have pressure to bring some of their research to market rather than solve for the long term.

Not at all because all later research was influenced by what went before. And of course all those people doing the work were not doing something else.

Don't forget S was developed at Bell Labs, the mother of R.

bell didn’t spring into existence a monopoly. GP described the conditions that grew bell

Seems like the early CATV operators would have been an easy target for bell.

> But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.

And transistor [0], laser [1], CCD image sensor [2] to name a few more.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Townes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device#History

I heard Townes in a small lecture at Berkeley once. As I recall he described a bit of a struggle getting Bell Labs interested in patenting the maser (or some similar administrative detail). He offered that the key phrase turned out to be: you might be able to use this for communications.

It’s interesting you mention Google because they do have quasi-monopoly profits that allow them to fund a lot of different things. Sure, they launch a new chat app every year and close it. But look beyond that.

Their profits allow them to staff projects that we benefit from. For example, programming languages like Go, Dart and (soon) Carbon. Go is a particularly good example here because it was literally created by Bell Labs alumni working at Google.

And it’s not just languages. No other organisation in the world wants to create another operating system. We’ve reached a local maxima with Windows, Linux and macOS (+iOS) that no one has the capability of challenging. The sensible thing is to run these operating systems till the end of time because they’re good enough. And yet Google with its profits says “how about we build an OS with a completely different approach?”

Quite apart from Google’s impact on the world, we benefit from having the option of Go, Fuschia and the rest of it. This is the product of research and development they have funded. Even if we don’t use them directly, we learn from their approach for future attempts to improve things.

>For example, programming languages like Go, Dart and (soon) Carbon.

So what’s innovative about them, that hasn’t been tried before?

>No other organization wants to create another operating system.

Erm, what? Lots of companies created, and still create, new operating systems, it’s just that they don’t have the PR to make noise about it. Also what’s this “different approach” you’re talking about? Capability based security is some 50 years old, has been implemented several times, and is the default sandboxing model in FreeBSD.

Can you show some really crucial inventions from Google, comparable to eg Unix, or transistor? Inventions, as in, something else turn repackaging old ideas with lots of marketing around them?

What a curious standard you use to judge inventions. Inventions from Google inspired by previous approaches are discredited as derivative ... while inventions by Bell Labs also inspired by previous approaches get a free pass?

Are you under the impression that Unix was the first operating system, or that C was the first programming language? What do you reckon about C++, also invented at Bell Labs? The folks at Bell Labs were giants and they stood on the shoulders of giants.

Carbon could make a substantial difference to the safety of C++ software by migrating such codebases to a relatively safer language. That's an improvement that we benefit from because Google and friends are publishing it as FOSS. Has a similar approach of gradual migration been done before? Kotlin and TypeScript did it. Eschewing C++ templates for generics? That's from Swift. Using syntax that's easy to read and to parse? Inspired by Rust. They're up front that they're inspired by all these successful languages.

But who cares? The fact is, something doesn't need to be completely novel for it to be useful. You can denigrate the work of others all you like, but all work that's done by humans is inspired by previous work by someone else. That's a fundamental fact of life. Even something as game changing as the transistor was inspired by existing vacuum tubes.

There's an inherent tension in this take.

The people need to be free to study whatever they want without profit interfering, but also they need to be attached to a for profit business in a specific arena that has monopoly profits.

What is the magic ingredient that we lose if we just give the public's money (plus some extra we get from avoiding the inefficency of monopolies) to academics directly and tell them to build cool stuff?

Is it patents? Is this basically an internal Venture Capital thing using monopoly profits? If they get to stick their flag in one new idea before anyone else then they get to extract rent from everyone else and/or squash competition and so pay for the 99 misses?

edit: they were forced to licence their patents in 1956 so before that, patents were presumably the goal.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190086

The above suggests that the open licencing of the patents spurred innovation, except in telecoms, where AT&T maintained their monopoly.

You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.

someone at Bell Labs once remarked that 90% of staff worked on development (bringing research into a practical deployment). Based on that they estimate that development is ~10% more difficult than research. While works like Shannon’s or Bardeen’s or Pierce’s stand out, most of the work was devoted to deployment. Something academics and patents don’t cover.

So the modern equivalent might be Sunshot where the government recognises a certain area with potential like PV (sort of a Bell Labs innovation coincidentally) and then funds efforts to commercialize and drive prices down while supporting initial business in the field.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-initiative

A decentralised, non-monopolistic Bell Labs for the 21st century.

Oh, just noticed it was announced by a Bell Labs alumni, Steven Chu, in his role as U.S. Energy Secretary.

> You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.

If you have time, could you share some specific recommendations?

If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?

> If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?

The "Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner comes to mind. It is quite accurate.

This was basically the approach of Mozilla Research AIUI, which gave us Rust.

IIRC this talk goes into a lot of history there: https://youtu.be/9OHcJzJQ2Nk.

Industrial labs pay better and don't sink as much time into grantsmanship.

It's not so much that they are magical, it's that traditional academia sabotages itself by being stingy. Industrial leaders have a better calibrated sense for when "stingy" becomes "counterproductive," so they don't shoot themselves and their scientists in the foot.

I don't see the connection. We have just gone through the longest bull market in history. Large tech companies were absolutely rolling in cash, hiring tens of thousands of expensive software engineers, whose purpose was unclear.

What do we have to show for it? That's right - complex ad algorithms and sophisticated content suggestions that lead to escalating extremism and teenage girl depression.

I would blame the "stakeholder value" culture more than anything. Short-term profits over long-term growth and innovation. GE and Boeing had every opportunity to do cool things, but the Jack Welch school of management drained these companies of life, with piece-by-piece sell offs and stock buybacks (which, by the way, were illegal at this scale before the early 80s).

The problem is not monopolies or lack of (although the government is effectively toothless at this point in that regard).

The problem is broken Capitalism and ass-backwards incentives.

Isn't Meta kind of doing this with VR/AR? Spending billions every year on research with speculative future value..

>What do we have to show for it?

Go, Rust, Chrome, Android, TensorFlow, PyTorch, tensor processing units, free education material, free email, free chat, data center scale computing... Upcoming there is self driving cars, ar/vr, quantum computing...

We actually have quite a lot to show.

Ie rehashed old ideas, but “free”, as in, paid from ads.

Poor refutation.

Neither of the languages or machine learning frameworks are old ideas or directly ad supported. Tensor processing units and cloud computing are also purchased directly.

Once again: can you point me at the new ideas here?

Go and Rust - these are just languages. They do not fundamentally change the world in any way.

Free email and chat - come on. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, ICQ, we had all that - without feeling violated from all the aggressive data collection, which leads me to... machine learning libraries. That's what they are used for.

Most of the technological "advances" since 2007 (Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, big data) have been used to steal and monetize our focus, and hence we have half of our kids on Adderall. That's what we really have to show for it.

And notice that all these names you dropped - layman would have zero idea what those are. They mean nothing to an average person. My point is about the larger culture of innovation across all industries, not just some stuff deep inside the software world.

Monopolies don't foster innovation, which is the implicit claim you are making.

If the ROI on a lab is the best of available options and the company has sufficient capital then... it will get done.

Being a monopoly makes the capital part easier, but a non-monopoly of sufficient size would make the same decision.

And the direct effect of monopolies on innovation is even worse: that the directly stifle competitors.

unfortunately, i don't have access to university resources anymore. but i suspect that if someone were to go pull the 1980 annual report for at&t (T) from the proquest historical annual reports database (should be available via online library resources to anyone with an active university affilation) and were to take those financials and the inflation adjust them (perhaps to pre-pandemic times as things are all shifting around right now), and then compared the revenues and profits of the top five largest technology companies in the united states, one would find that they're on a similar scale.

unfortunately i cannot verify that for myself right now.

One of the key problems is that in todays society, those high monopoly rents wouldn't necessarily be re-invested in projects

" Want Google to have a Bell Labs"

Are you suggesting that google couldn't already do this if they had chosen too?

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