Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
sts10.github.io
sts10.github.io
After 20 years of hoping for a Bell Labs to magically show up again, I now work to emulate this culture but with a focus on energy systems that has the same characteristics as combustion engines but with 10x power/energy-density (and zero emissions).
If this resonates with anyone here, feel free to reach out.
Looking forward to some updates as things firm up.
I would say natural competition has been around for a long time, and can act as an obstacle to natural co-operation. That co-operation seems to be so much more difficult to establish and maintain. But when you get strong individuals who are advanced in so many different directions, and let them keep going, it could take time associating together before some fruitful common ground can be staked out, but there's nothing else like it.
I remember reports like "The AT&T Switching Evolution Challenge", "Software in Large", "Improving on the Best: Like a 1A, Only Better", "Components for Software Fault Tolerance and Rejuvenation", or scientific reports like " Studies of Large-Scale Earth Potentials Across Oceanic Distances".
After more than thirty years, I still have many of them in a thick folder. Thanks to everyone who inspired me back then and gave me an peek into a different IT world!
I got nerd sniped by a Facebook meme joking on a Gen Z "text chat" caption to a "Gone with the Wind" still that said "tbh bae idgaf" in place of the infamous Clark Gable line and how incomprehensible that seemed and might be to past generations. All the individual pieces existed in 1940 when "Gone with the Wind" released to figure it out (TBH was already well established as an acronym, babe as a term of endearment was too though the bae form is a very recent twist, IDGAF was easily explainable/guessable as an acronym, especially to anyone familiar with military acronyms at the time and/or the quote in context). That lead to the idea of writing a short story about what if Bell Labs accidentally got that MMS message in 1940, which has lead to fun micro-research like some of the basics of SS7 (the true backwards compatibility point of no return for MMS) and how much Bell Labs might recognize SS7 from the 1940's era of basically "SS3.5", and how much any of it might look like AT&T technology to them if they were staring at printouts. I'm absolutely taking fictional liberties with it as the answer is probably that SS7 would be a massive stretch for 1940s tech even with IBM's involvement (which makes for a silly semi-cooperative antagonist of sorts in the story). UTF-8's ASCII compatibility (emoji are a running undecodable debate in the story), and Unix's epoch timestamps would probably feel familiar to AT&T/Bell Labs (even if they probably would not have guessed the epoch start date of 1970 from 1940). I even felt like giving IBM a small "win", for the sake of interesting fiction, in guessing that IBM might have helped design JPEG (they did, in the 1990s), though I'm currently assuming that JPEG would have been undecodable in 1940 (even the math for wavelet compression was decades away) and 40s IBM would probably be upset JPEG encodes small bits of ASCII and Unix epoch timestamps. (40s IBM in my story was also upset by "new phone who dis?" Our world really does kind of look like "What if AT&T did win at computers like their 50s/60s ads thought they might?" but for many of the wrong reasons and twists neither AT&T nor IBM would have expected.)
It's been a fun, silly story to write (I start with AT&T Bell Labs/IBM combined spending a bunch of time decoding a "u up?") with the excuse to at least do some light dives into the crazy backwards compatibility stories of some of the technology we just sort of take for granted today.
We saw displays of their research work and got to talk to some of the researchers. Some was fundamental semiconductor physics (which my dad loved, as he had a PhD in the area). Much was about the practicalities of running a telephone network. And a few displays were a glimpse of the future. Using the prototype video phone felt like being in an episode of the Jetsons!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64
Watching it made me realize a lot of batch-esque things like Hadoop and Spark aren't too far off, just more automated.
Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a little. There may have also been additional operating company funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed administrative software for their use.
The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free environment is incorrect. In the development organizations there was fierce competition between developers of analog versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial cable systems, space division versus time-division switching, etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure there was considerable competition for resources, funding, and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.
I may have done some exploring.
For me in my college years, it was Xerox Parc (well past the heyday of the mouse and such) working in image compression. Parc was still an entity.
Raw research is what I miss. No one really does it anymore.
Humanist, surprising, challenging but comforting at the same time
On the top floor, bright sunspots are cast onto the floor, peeking through the roof as if through the dense branches of an old forest
New kinds of thinking, new kinds of connections, new kinds of possibilities. The mission is to uncover more never-known-before territories every day. Permutations evolving through randomness, experimentation and pattern recognition. Start a thousand projects and add a hundred every day.
I suspect the old Pivotal Labs was like this, if you can speak enough enterprise-ese to figure it out.
An AT&T handset could be used to beat up a burglar and then still be used to call the police. They were, to say the least, indestructible.
Nokia phones were that way for a bit (I forget what model number) where you could have them fly off the roof of your car at speed, and find them run over twice and still working (assuming the battery stayed in).
The latest iPhone flying out of a plane "window" and then landing still running and unbroken was an impressive moment and harkened back to earlier times.
The break up of att lead to a race to the bottom on handsets, they were disposable in a bad way for a while.
As seen by their BSD lawsuit right after they were allowed to sell UNIX.
That's putting it harshly of course, but it's probably notable that the only places you might find something approaching a team or department like the Bell Labs of old are large incumbents in fields like Apple or Microsoft. If you're a smaller competitor or in a highly competitive space, you don't have the luxury of being able to spend large chunks of money and people on R&D that may never produce anything useful or salable. In theory you might be able to get something like this out of academia, but then you run into the publish or perish mindsets.
I wonder if one way the states and federal government could encourage development in towns and areas that are dying as the world consolidates and small towns lack opportunity would be to subsidize these sorts of non-competitive R&D spaces in those otherwise undesirable living areas. A sort of multi pronged subsidy, to both the workers (discounted home loans, dedicated public transport), to the local industries (grants or loans to builders in the area to build homes and infrastructure) and to the companies themselves (tax incentives, short term subsidizing of salaries etc), and in exchange the public and the government gets the results of the research perhaps under reduced term patents or special licensing deals.
One thing unmentioned we benefited from as kids in the 80s was super kick ass technical book stores in Naperville and Wheaton.
I was sad seeing the big red zero logo of Lucent on the new building across the street, and the withering of the place.