
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? - yulunli
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/09_36/b4145036681619.htm
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orionblastar
Bell Labs was over when AT&T was broken up in the 1980s by the DOJ.

My father worked for AT&T and was forced into early retirement after the
breakup. They had Bell Labs 1ESS switches that they were trying to turn into
computers running Unix. But after the break up the Baby Bells used IBM System
36 computers instead. My father's skills were obsolete and he struggled to
find work. I taught him how to use a PC and Windows and then later on gave him
a LiveCD to boot Linux in case his Windows XP got messed up. He liked Linux
better because he could do Unix commands in it. He passed away in 2010.

When I was young there was the Telephone Pioneers that my father was a part
of, and they had picnics and meetings. When I heard about the Bell Labs work
on Unix and C, and Dennis Ritchie I decided to become a programmer. The only
thing I could learn at age 12 was BASIC. I didn't learn C until 1987 at a
community college. I tried a four year college first but could not afford it.
Went to the community college and worked part-time to afford it.

Bell Labs was been sold and resold. It is just a shell of what it used to be.
I doubt it can ever become what it once was. Something else will have to take
its place.

Creating jobs is hard, technology automates work and gets rid of jobs by
replacing them with automated processes. The jobs that get created require a
different education and skill set, and the cost of college is ever increasing.

