The demise of Bell Labs, a pictorial
Wired is running a photo gallery related to the history of Bell Labs. If I had to pick one word to describe the photos, it would be depressing.
Besides the fact that Bell Labs was one of the greatest innovation companies of all time, I worked in two of the buildings that are part of the photo collection. My first "really real" job was at a Bell Labs start-up based on the Inferno programming language (which was based on Plan 9, a very early open-source OS) that Lucent attempted to commercialize.
I was based in the Murray Hill, N.J., building and used to see Dennis Ritchie in the elevator. We even got to bowl in the Unix lab. I then moved to the optical networking group down in Holmdel, N.J., before moving to California.
One of the pictures shows part of the Holmdel building, which was recently sold off to developers as part of the Lucent/Alcatel debacle. The building is historically significant not just because it was designed by Eero Saarinen but also because all kinds of technological breakthroughs occurred there. There is also a famous myth that a researcher at the Holmdel building got beat to the punch on his discovery and hurled himself off the 6th floor into the atrium.
Here are 10 Bell Labs innovations that changed the world.
- Data networking
- The transistor
- Cellular telephone technology
- Solar cells
- Lasers
- Digital transmission and switching
- Communications satellites
- Touch-tone telephones
- Unix operating system and C language
- Digital signal processors
Without Bell Labs, very few people who read this blog would have jobs today.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com.
I think part of the end of Bell Labs was the break up of AT&T back in the early 1980s.
The old Bell System phone bills included a very small fee (buried in the rate-making process) that customers paid to fund Bell Telephone Laboratories. There was no replacement when competition arose and expenses had to be cut in an attempt to match competitors' pricing.
We need to remember that the private competitive market is not equipped to solve problems in a grand scale. Creative thought, by definition, is risky and often ineffective.
The success of the Labs' researchers arose because they were allowed to spend and fail and try again.
We continue to miss them.