
The Ghost of Invention: A Visit to Bell Labs - DocFeind
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/coupland-bell-labs/
======
angersock
My first internship was at a company that was (apparently) a pretty big deal
in the 80s, and by the time I'd gotten there was relegated to a quarter corner
of a small floor in a building. The passion had long since left, the three
remaining programmers were just ticking off days, and a sort of miasma of
sadness and despair hung in the air. There was a brief hope when we showed up
to work on a goofy R&D project, and within a few weeks you could tell the
office was happier to have my co-intern and I around, if for no other reason
than we were fresh, youthful faces.

I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and
it was stagnation.

In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former
personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the
poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the
future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket
ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love
and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate
those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead
on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other
things.

By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry
is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to
_make_ things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA
would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you
can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to
hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear.

This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the
planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.

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bhousel
Interesting article. I live down the street from the Acatel-Lucent Murray Hill
campus, and have explored it occasionally while running.

The campus is bizarrely sad, like the article describes, a place where its
best years seem behind it. They have one of those trail/fitness courses that
snakes around the back, and it's in terrible disrepair. And a basketball court
with broken nets and weeds growing through it. But they installed a brand new
shuffleboard court! I guess the demographics of the place have changed...

~~~
biscuitt
I've live right down the road from it as well. It was always fun driving by
and seeing a bunch of people playing cricket on the front lawn

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gshubert17
A sad thing happened to me recently. I had looked up some data files that
accompanied Kernighan's "Practice of Programming" book from a server at Bell
Labs [0], and had downloaded a couple of the files from chapter 3, but today I
get an "Unable to load page" error message.

[0] [http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/](http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/)

~~~
kps
Yes, I just noticed a couple days ago that [http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/](http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/) is gone (and
blocked from archive.org).

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rasz_pl
Wow this is one depressing article. Not only the place is in the past, people
working in it also appear to be stuck in 1995.

> in 1995, “Nobody in Bell Labs used the Internet

:(( I did.

>umbrella with a GSM modem that glows blue when it knows you’ll be needing it

its called an app, on your phone

>Medicine bottles that record the number of times they’ve been opened

already patented several times over and on the market for years

[http://www.epill.com/timecap.html](http://www.epill.com/timecap.html)

I was expecting place like that to be working on big stuff. Quantum
teleportation, beam forming, not fart apps and magic umbrellas :(

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MaDeuce
Anyone with an interest in the Holmdel facility will likely enjoy this photo
album of the now-empty site.

[http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-
labs](http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs)

It was an impressive building at the time. Having worked there for years, it
is rather unsettling to see it featured as an abandoned urban site.

~~~
vdnkh
I live in Holmdel and I've spelunked Bell Labs many times since it's closed,
but not the main building as seen in these pictures. The satellite buildings
to the south are in disrepair but are very interesting. The semi-anechoic
chamber was among the best preserved, located in a small shed on top of a
hill. I gained access by gently kicking in a small window near the main door.
Everything important had been stripped out but the essentials remained- the
turntable was still intact along with the stairs down to the control room. A
visitor log book found here contained several records, including emerging cell
phones and even the sega genesis. I moved onto the office next which was where
I found most of my treasure. Mugs, books, branded memorabilia, etc. was poured
all over the floor- it gave me the impression the facility was abandoned
rather quickly. On my wall is my favorite piece, a large blueprint of
"buildings within 1000 ft of the EMI facility" which was located nearby.

The second most interesting building was the "Oceanic wave test facility". Its
a fairly mundane building along the perimeter of the property, located between
an emergency power plant and the strong waste holding tanks. On one of my
first visits here the room was filled with equipment- open books on desks
facing a mainframe computer filled the room. I couldn't get in because I was
worried about tripping an alarm or alerting the patrolling security guard so I
left. On my next visit all of the equipment was gone.

There are a few other buildings and interesting artifacts (including a replica
horn radio made of solid metal), but since it was acquired security has
tightened up a bit. I took a ton of pictures, maybe one day I'll post em.

~~~
jpmattia
Post em!

I used to work in Murray Hill, but traveled a bunch to Holmdel and Crawford
Hill facilities. I'm not totally surprised by the oceanic wave sim; There used
to be a sizeable submarine fiber group before it got sold to Tyco.

What was the replica horn? There is of course a somewhat famous horn,
responsible for finding the 4K background radiation, but it has a plaque:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Labs_Horn_Antenna_Cra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Labs_Horn_Antenna_Crawford_Hill_NJ.jpg)

~~~
vdnkh
In front of the building stretching about 50 feet was a tunnel, now flooded.
Rumor has it that there is an even larger tunnel encircling the perimeter of
the facility. I checked google maps at the time and could see evidence for
this. I believe the entrance is located in a cooling tower near the baseball
diamonds but that facility has more intense locks.

The replica horn I found in front of the "Global Compliance Test Facility"
right across from the wave facility. It's not too large (probably the size of
a person), but it's very very heavy.

------
thomasjudge
Prose like this feels to me like the outcome of a peculiar disease which seems
to affect particularly tech-oriented writers who have achieved a certain level
of notoriety; the task of communicating ideas becomes subordinate to the
florid expression of the author's own wonderfulness.

~~~
potbelly83
Agreed. I like this particular gem: "...except in this case, the intelligence
factor has escalated logarithmically".

------
scott_s
I find it disconcerting when one of the repeated themes of a piece is the
author's own ignorance and inability to understand the people he is talking
to.

------
hypertexthero
I highly recommend _Another Great Day at Sea, Life Aboard The USS George H.W.
Bush_ by Geoff Dyer with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins, from the same
'Writers in Residence' series as Kitten Clone.

Here's a sample from chapter 22:

> One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I
> felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my
> door seconds after I'd done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had
> summoned him — a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the
> phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our
> visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up
> there right away.

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tsunamifury
This is a very good article -- and it is about much more than Bell Labs.

In the later sections the author attacks singularity problems, humanities
place as it continues to virtualize more and more of itself, and frames Bell
Labs as the remnants of reality left over (and maybe we still inhabit) after
we move our minds further and further from our physical presence.

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segmondy
I wonder when this will happen to google and facebook. Happend to Xerox Labs,
then Bell Labs/lucent. It's hard to imagine google and facebook being ghosts
from the past, but everything must end at some point right?

~~~
a3n
And Microsoft.

When a company gets big enough, the people who operate the machine that is the
company become more prominent than the people that do what the company is
supposedly in existence for. Because when a company gets that big, the sole
reason it exists is to make money, and what it does to make money is
incidental. In that sense, Google is exactly the same as Kroger.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger)

Every large billion dollar company is doomed to be a large billion dollar
company.

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LeoPanthera
Is this page completely broken for anyone else? (Safari 7.1 on OS X, no
extensions)

[http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg)

~~~
MaysonL
Yeah, seems broken for me too, Safari 8 on Yosemite.

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casca
Douglas Coupland gave a great talk about the book at the RSA on Tuesday -
[http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-
events/2014/Insi...](http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-
events/2014/Inside-Alcatel-Lucent-with-Douglas-Coupland)

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advocaat23
What a crappy design. If I scroll down and there is an image, I have to scroll
further (without visual indication) and then the text will float over.

I have seen this design now on multiple pages, how is this called? IMHO it is
a terrible user experience.

//edit: No, really, what's the idea? It really messes up the scrolling
experience.

~~~
slouch
I think this is a style inspired by The New York Times' "Snow Fall," but this
instance is not as good. [http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-
fall/#/?part=tunne...](http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-
fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek)

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kjs3
What the actual fuck is up with that intro paragraph? Robot housewives? Not a
bad article after that, but crap on a cracker that was painful to read.

~~~
joezydeco
It's Douglas Coupland. He's normally a fiction writer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland)

