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I probably should have said "important" instead of "interesting".

How many of those companies are doing research that can be compared to what came out of Bell Labs in the 60's and 70's - the transistor, the laser, ... ?

IBM's work on advanced semiconductors and Watson certainly qualify. The later will probably be seen as one of the most important developments in the history of humanity and it wouldn't have been possible without the former.

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its pretty hard to know what is important in the moment.

Not really. Lots of people knew that the laser was important, that Xerox park stuff was important, that C/Unix was important, etc even at the time they were introduced.

In the case of the laser, there may have been some sense that it was important, but at the time there were no immediate applications and it was called "a solution in search of a problem."

In Wikipedia though it says that "Gould’s notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959."

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