
Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983 - ssclafani
http://bstj.bell-labs.com/
======
britta
This one from 1978 is the UNIX issue:

[http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1978/BSTJ.1978.5706-...](http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1978/BSTJ.1978.5706-2.html)

I chose to read parts of it for a class a few years ago and found it
surprisingly modern-sounding.

The epigraph on the foreword: "Intelligence...is the faculty of making
artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. — Bergson"

From the preface: "Because computer science is still in an early stage of
development, no well-formulated theoretical sructure exists around which
problems can be defined and results organized. 'Elegance' is of prime
importance, but is not easily defined or described. Reliability and
maintainability are important, but they also are neither precisely defined nor
easily measured."

On the inside back cover: "This issue of the Bell System Technical Journal was
composed, including all tabular and displayed material and final page makeup,
using the document preparation software described on pages 2115-2135. It was
phototypeset using the troff program, which was written by the late Joseph F.
Ossanna, Jr."

The list of contributors includes one woman, Helen D. Rovegno, but Google
doesn't say anything about her.

My grandfather was a technical editor for the BSTJ and other Bell Labs
publications for most of his life, but unfortunately he never really talked
about it in detail to me.

------
mrbill
The telecom nerd in me just EXPLODED.

It's great that they've finally put all of these online; no more inter-library
loans or having to troll eBay to look up an article.

My favorite: the September 1964 special issue detailing the 1ESS electronic
switch.

[http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1964/BSTJ.1964.4305....](http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1964/BSTJ.1964.4305.html)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1ESS>

------
KC8ZKF
"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" Shannon, C.E.

<http://bstj.bell-labs.com/BSTJ/images/Vol27/bstj27-3-379.pdf>

~~~
hga
Be sure to get part 2 in the next issue at <http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/BSTJ/images/Vol27/bstj27-4-623.pdf>

~~~
ableal
Plus: Shannon, Claude E., The Synthesis of Two Terminal Switching Circuits,
Bell System Technical Journal, 28: 1. January 1949, <http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/BSTJ/images/Vol28/bstj28-1-59.pdf>

------
car
Ah, fond memories. I recall a bus ride through snowed in Denver in 1984, to
get a copy of the original blue box article referenced in phone phreak lore at
the downtown library, just to find that these pages had long been removed from
the journal copy.

Here the article I believe in question: "Pushbutton Calling with a Two-Group
Voice-Frequency Code, Schenker, L.", [http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1960/BSTJ.1960.3901....](http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1960/BSTJ.1960.3901.html).

There is an older article covering dial tones (DTMF): "In-Band Single-
Frequency Signaling, Weaver, A.; Newell, N.A.", found in [http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1954/BSTJ.1954.3306....](http://bstj.bell-
labs.com/oldfiles/year.1954/BSTJ.1954.3306.html)

------
juiceandjuice
Bell did science for science's sake, not just for the telecom industry, and
that's what was really unique about them, I think. Specifically, I remember
reading an article a while back that talked about Bell Labs being the leading
employer of Physicists in private industry at one time. There's not a lot of
companies like that anymore, except Google (vicariously) and places like IBM's
Watson Research Center.

~~~
juiceandjuice
Interesting blog post regarding this:
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2009/08/we-
miss-y...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2009/08/we-miss-you-
bel.html)

Slight Tangent: Before I got my BS in Applied Physics, I did a lot of research
in experimental astroparticle physics. I learned a lot of interdisciplinary
stuff, and I thought those combinations would easily land me at least a ~40k
job doing something (programming, electronics stuff, whatever). Turned out I
was wrong, and I couldn't find a job anywhere in my hometown (even though I
could run circles around any of the new CS grads in most languages) I learned
a hard lesson that I thought would haunt me for the next decade: People don't
want to hire scientists, they only want engineers. I got a shitty $15/hr part
time job as a test tech, got sick of that and then realized I couldn't get
into grad school for financial reasons. I had a bit of money so I applied only
to physics jobs at high profile schools or labs across the country (partially
motivated by this site, actually). Within a week I got an email back from
Stanford (SLAC) to do an interview for a developer. It turned out that I had
all the right kinds of experience, and I just started last Thursday at what
can only be described as the perfect job for me right now.

I think most companies these days just overlook the value of research, basic
science, and scientists in favor of marketing, products, and engineers. The
risk that research doesn't lead to a marketable product is too high for almost
every company, and that's a shame.

~~~
cma
I think it is more the freerider problem; Bell didn't suffer it significantly
because they held a huge monopoly, and had few other ways to expand, even if
others would benefit freely from their research.

------
jmspring
I have to agree this is a telecom geek's dream. My father worked on a bunch of
this stuff in the late 70s and 80s. I just sent him the link to geek out on.

This is a great source to build on top of the assorted 2600 articles from over
the years.

------
quadhome
I'd really like these in HTML or EPUB.

Quick math says 500 pages per journal by 382 journals gives 382,000 pages. The
going rate on Mechanical Turk seems to be $1 / page for human OCR. All the
decent hosted OCRs sites I ran tests on are about .15c per page.

Yikes! Out of my budget. :-(

However,
[http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...](http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR)
did a half-decent job on some random selections. Any Googlers want to (ab)use
company resources?

~~~
Kadin
If you could get the copyright holder to release them into the public domain,
then they would be a great candidate for Distributed Proofreaders. 382kpgs
would still take a while (although maybe not too much if it attracted new
volunteers), but it would be by far the cheapest solution.

------
johnohara
Am I the only one having difficulty loading these pages? Each article (.pdf)
seems to be about 1.5 - 2.5 MB. But it's taking 3-5 minutes for anything to
appear.

The lists appear immediately.

------
thirdstation
Does anyone know when this archive was released? The copyright at the bottom
of the index page says 2010 so can we assume this is a recent, awesome event?

BTW: I Googled for some PR for this but didn't find any (at least, on the
first page of results).

------
meatsock
is there any centralized source for large lists of interesting documents like
this? i'd love to know if there's a project gutenberg for juicy whitepapers.

