
Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993) - selfishgene
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106703?seq=1
======
for_schwartz
Here's a PDF [https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.2307/3106703)

~~~
neonate
Also [https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-
bell-...](https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-bell-
laboratories-and-magnetic-recording.html)

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dukoid
TLDR: "Management feared that the availability of a recording device would
make customers less willing to use the telephone system and so undermine the
concept of universal service. (...) The fear took two forms. First, if
conversations became matters of record in the same way as letters or other
contracts, managers felt that customers would abandon the telephone for
critical negotiations and return to the mails, where a slip of the tongue
would not prove fatal. (...) Second, if conversations could be recorded,
matters of an illegal or immoral nature, which some executives estimated made
up as much as one third of all calls, would no longer be discussed by phone.
(...) Although one might expect that managers would stress the economic half
of this equation, in fact they paid far more attention to the question of
trust and image. During this period AT&T had constant public relations
problems, largely the result of antitrust investigations. Thus, the fact that
magnetic recording might create a major upset with only a minor gain for a few
customers who could afford to have their calls answered automatically was
simply not acceptable for managers concerned with preserving AT&T's good
name."

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Merrill
The 1947 anti-trust lawsuit was settled by the 1956 consent decree which
forced AT&T to exit all businesses not related to providing a national
telecommunications network and which also required royalty-free licensing of
all patents. For example, the Westrex sound recording business for movie
production was sold to Litton.

This undoubtedly reduced any appetite for deploying any customer premises
recording devices which would be similar to recording technology used for
entertainment purposes. In fact, telephone answering machines became popular
only after the development of low cost Phillips cassette recording technology
driven by entertainment markets.

Note also that the gating of technology into the Bell System from Bell
Laboratories via Western Electric was by design. Bell Labs was set up
independently of and funded by AT&T Headquarters and Western Electric. This
allowed Bell Labs to research (AT&T) and develop (WECo) technologies
independently of short term business needs in order to prevent the Bell
Operating Company regulated monopolies from stagnating, and it also prevented
the system from being disrupted by short term engineering hacks. What were
wanted were big innovations, thoughtfully applied.

~~~
dredmorbius
One of the more famous consequences of that 1956 consent decree was Unix, and
from it, Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS.

A case in which competition and capital actively interfered with creativity
and innovation.

------
dredmorbius
Resistance to technological innovation, often by commercial concerns, is all
too common.

Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations"
(1937) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including
specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly
becoming among my favourite references to these:

[https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...](https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39)

As Markdown:
[https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is](https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is)

That looks at cases of such opposition in several areas:

\- Transportation

\- Communication

\- Power

\- Metals

\- Textile Machinery

\- Agricultural Machinery

\- Building

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ncmncm
IBM's Watson Lab had the same role in preventing innovations from escaping and
upsetting stable markets. Hiring up promising PhDs to prevent them working for
somebody else, and keeping them busy not developing for anybody else, was its
main purpose, so almost everything they did went straight to the shelf. In the
'90s, IBM started taking things off the shelf.

------
kybball
Ironic that this article is on jstor

~~~
selfishgene
Hope it was one that Aaron Swartz was able to download before MIT arrested
him.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's on both LibGen and Sci-Hub.

Former:
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703)

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omphalos
FYI I see [dead] by your comments. Maybe you have been hell-banned?

~~~
dang
Please don't post like this. If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be
dead, you should vouch for it
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))
or email hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix the problem

~~~
mirimir
OK, but how could I vouch for users?

I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional
comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that
was transgressive. But often enough, nothing.

So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes.

"[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged"
only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment.

Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while.
But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email,
as described above. I do this myself on occasion.

Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've set "showdead"
to on, in your HN profile settings.

~~~
mirimir
OK, thanks. I'll try it and see how it goes.

It's so sad to see banned accounts consistently making interesting and
constructive comments, which are mostly all dead, except for the occasional
vouched one. And sometimes _for years_. That's quite the cruel punishment.

Being paranoid by nature, I routinely check my account from other IPs whenever
my comments aren't getting replies. And I wonder if others do that. I mean,
could someone go for a year without realizing that their account had been
banned?

