
What made Bell Labs special? (2012) [pdf] - sndean
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/bell.pdf
======
zw123456
That brought back memories for me, I worked there from 1978 - 1984. It was
special and I agree with a lot of what the author said, but I would also
highlight the people that ran the place. My boss was amazing, too long to list
all the reasons but never forgot him. It takes a special type of person to
manage highly skilled technical people effectively. I think there are some
places like that today (maybe Google, I don't know first hand only from
friends that work there). But in my view, that is the key, creating an
environment that those types special people are able to thrive in. Bell Labs
did that, maybe it was because they were a monopoly that they had that luxury,
but I think there was more to it than that.

~~~
CamelCaseName
If it's not too late, reach out to your old boss and let him know. It will
make a world of difference to him.

~~~
Aloha
I called the guy who gave me my start in telecom up a good 4-5 years ago, and
spent two hours on the phone with him thanking him for giving me a chance at
it, without him I never would have made it as far.

------
yeukhon
"At Bell, the financial motive was not grants but contributing to the
company’s product lines. This seems reasonable to me, both because telephone
service is a public good and because, as Gertner notes, the challenges of
improving phone service motivated technical advances that benefited other
areas as well."

The thing is AT&T was the monopoly of telecommunication service in the US back
then. When Paul Baran went to present his "packet switching" (which is also
independently studied and proposed by UK's Donlad Davies, and both combined
with Leonard Kleinrock's theoretical analysis became packet switching in the
development of the "Internet") to AT&T, AT&T laughed it off and said no,
mainly because AT&T did not want to adopt the digital communication and wanted
to maintain its monopoly. The engineers at AT&T (not Bell Labs) pretty much
said to Baran he lacked the fundamental understanding of how communication
system works. Just to be fair, at work, in the beginning RAND Corp engineers
were also not convinced, but nonetheless Baran was able to get enough support
and appreciation from his fellow coworkers and the company's management that
he demoed to AT&T.

This is a story of a classic corporate engineer who has the "know-it-all"
mindset vs the classic researcher/engineer who appreciate challenges and
differences.

I recommend reading "When Wizards Stay Up Late".

I think companies which allow some degree of hacker/research culture really do
benefit from the openness and innovation. Google's 20% (although I read most
engineers don't get any free time at all and 20% was not a formal policy, and
20% was just a spontaneous thing in the early stage of Google), FB's internal
Hackathon crated some of the most-used features/products at the respective
company. I think another modern example is Stripe, I consistently heard
something great about its culture.

~~~
Aloha
AT&T was responsible for much of the base technology that made packet
switching even possible. They did however stuck (largely for good
technological reasons) with circuit switching all the way thru, even if it was
largely digital by 1984.

~~~
wolfgke
Even today there are considerations whether packet switching is really better
than circuit switching in particular if reliability is a concern: For circuit
switching one can (often) guarantee, say, the bandwidth of the service offered
over wire, for packet switching this is between hard and impossible.

So while I can accept that for many applications packet switching is the
better choice, I can understand AT&T at least with respect to why they still
wanted to offer a circuit-switched service.

~~~
iamcreasy
> for packet switching this is between hard and impossible.

Isn't that what Virtual Circuits[1] are for?

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_circuit)

------
Animats
Someone asked the head of Bell Labs that question once. He answered
"Consistent funding".

~~~
crispyambulance
I think having a fountain of money is certainly a good thing, but other
companies today enjoy consistent funding and they're nothing like Bell Labs.

For example, Verizon and Comcast. Both rake in vast sums, but where is the
fundamental research and contributions?? It appears that mostly gets folded
into boring vertical business initiatives.

I suspect a key difference is that the old Bell Labs wasn't beholden to
excessive Professional Project Management running the show and making sure
everyone has their nose to the grindstone at all times.

~~~
dasmoth
_I suspect a key difference is that the old Bell Labs wasn 't beholden to
excessive Professional Project Management running the show and making sure
everyone has their nose to the grindstone at all times._

I think that's true, and was also true to a greater or lesser extent in many
of the other hotbeds of 20th century research -- perhaps including those
embedded in more conventional companies (IBM Research and Xerox PARC both come
to mind).

Short of being wealth enough to self-fund, are there any truly low-
managerialism research places left today?

------
luckydude
This is a little off topic but maybe it highlights the sort of people that
worked there.

When I was an undergrad I had some Unix question so I emailed Dennis Ritchie
(...!research!dmr) and asked him about it, we went back and forth a bit.
Finally I asked him for his phone number and he sent it, I called him and we
quickly sorted out my question. Over the years, I've called him a number of
times. I suspect that if he were still with us he'd remember me, he seemed to
enjoy chatting and passing on his knowledge.

I had to think about to remember if it was just email or if we talked live. My
phone database put that straight:

    
    
        $ call ritchie
        Dennis Ritchie                  908-582-3770 (W/bell labs)
    

I was just a kid in college, nobody important, I hadn't contributed anything
of significance to the field. Yet he was happy to take time out of his day and
share his knowledge. I've had the same experience with bwk, I had some ideas I
wanted to hack into awk, emailed him and told him what I was thinking, not too
long later I open up my mailbox and there is a tarball of ~bwk/awk, all the
source, the docs, and the book in english and french.

Bell Labs was something special, pretty much everyone that I've met/talked to
who worked there were really nice people and more than happy to share their
knowledge. They only cared that you wanted to learn (and that you had a clue).
Smart (enough) guy who wants to learn more? Sure, here's my phone number.

BTW, there is mailing list for old Unix hackers that I enjoy, if you like that
sort of thing you might check out [http://www.tuhs.org/](http://www.tuhs.org/)
\- it's got former Bell Labs people who comment on stuff pretty regularly.
It's pretty nerdy, there is a long thread going right now about old Unix
vulnerabilities (eg, passing the right negative number to kill(2) would get
you root) but I find it fascinating. Another thread that's going on is why C
choose to pass arrays by reference but everything else by value; another is a
discussion of C's type syntax (not a lot of love for the pointer binding to
the variable, people wish that "char* p1, p2" got you two pointers, not a
pointer and a char.)

------
Aloha
The breakup of AT&T likely made the world we live in today possible, but it
also killed the innovation engine that came up with much of the underlying
technology that the world we live in today was built on.

~~~
BrainInAJar
AT&T being forbidden from patenting it's inventions was the innovation
engine...

~~~
Aloha
No, AT&T did patent much of their inventions, they were prohibited from doing
something other than phone service and related equipment, so they licensed or
gave away their IP. They also had broad cross-licensing agreements with their
competitors in the industry (ITT/Kellog and Automatic Electric). AT&T however
was prohibited from selling computers until the 1956 consent decree was
vacated in 1984.

------
rectang
Our local chapter of Papers We Love has been looking for articles sort of like
this one but a little longer (maybe 3-10 pages), on either Bell Labs or Xerox
PARC. Any suggestions?

(We had a lively discussion on the 1945 Vannevar Bush essay, _As We May Think_
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/) and see this as a continuation.)

------
thisrod
I think that everyone should read _The Idea Factory_ , for a reason similar to
the reason that everyone should learn Lisp. Bell Labs no longer exists, and
you will never get to work there; but you can learn how research and
supervision could be done, and that will help you route around whatever damage
keeps the handbrake on at the place where you do work.

------
metaobject
Many years ago I recall seeing an image of the office layout where it showed
Dennis Ritchie's office being located near Ken Thompson's office (I believe).
I'm unable to locate it now, though.

That must've been an interesting work environment.

~~~
ori_b
[http://spinroot.com/gerard/img/5th_floor.gif](http://spinroot.com/gerard/img/5th_floor.gif)

I had the pleasure of taking over Al Aho/Brian Kerhighan's office for a summer
as an intern. Although, this was while Bell Labs was finishing dying -- both
of the long term residents had moved on long ago.

------
sethbannon
For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The
Idea Factory". It's a history of Bell Labs, focusing both on the biographies
of the engineers and also a meta story about how you create an organization
that consistently produces impactful innovation.

[https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-
Innovatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-
Innovation/dp/0143122797)

~~~
georgiecasey
i assume you're on mobile and that's why you commented before even opening the
article. it's a review of that book!

~~~
sethbannon
Correct. Apologies!

------
losteverything
Post divestiture i thought I was hot stuff with my cps and math degree. Only
to find out I was the dumbest in my BL group.

I remember people's email was their first name. I had to use first initial and
last name.

Eventually I moved to sales/marketing for consumer side. Consumer was fighting
MCI and share loss, looking for help from the Labs.

They created something that virtually eliminated all background noise
(Feldspar??) but it was not used/promoted afaik.

Then someone suggested that all AT&T long distance customers be given an emai
account: their number @ att.com (2015551212@att.com eg) aol was still mailing
3.5 floppies

There was really no vehicle to speed up the product side....

------
samfisher83
They got to spent 2% of company revenue on research. In modern times
shareholders would probably get furious at doing research.

------
Philipp__
There was the thread here not so long ago about XEROX Park, and it had pretty
detailed discussion. In the end it came down to funding.

