Hacker Read top | best | new | newcomments | leaders | about | bookmarklet login

And lasers. And Unix. And switched networking. And binary digital computers. And long-haul undersea cables. And the first successful communications satellite. And data networking.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/0...



sort by: page size:

So much innovation that came from one place: Bell Labs. Quite extraordinary.

Look at the amazing things that came from Bell Labs. The transistor, laser, cell phone (in the 40's!), UNIX......

Bell Labs made a bunch of breakthroughs that way, i.e. information theory.

A comment like this makes me think you really don't know much about Bell Labs.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/0...

A lot of modern computing traces back to them and Xerox.


Bell Labs did many, many more things than telecom.

Two words: "Bell Labs".

I think the transistor might have had something to do with all of this innovation. Not to mention C++, wireless networking, and a sizeable fraction of the semiconductor process technology that makes modern electronics possible.


Bell Labs got us microwave communications, lasers, transistors, Unix, C, awk, Plan 9, fiber optics, and a bunch of other things.

The new "sustainable" structures, frankly, aren't even a substitute.


As a Bell Labs fanboy this is one of my favorite bits of trivia. They invented the future a long, long time ago.

Sorry downvoter but you really have no idea how much more Bell-Labs has done.

The Simplex algorithm, the transistor, C and C++, the R programming language, the ccd, the mobile phone...

Just some from the top of my head


You forgot Bell Labs.

"Corporate R&D never worked very well in the first place." Huh?!? The first public fax transmission, the transistor, the first synchronous-sound motion picture, UNIX, C and C++, low-cost fiber optic phone systems, the first Wireless LAN, and numerous laser techonologies were all products of Bell Laboratories corporate R&D.

The future of telecommunications, brought to you by Bell's lab instead of Bell Labs.

The Bell Labs Song [1] neatly lists all the innovations -- and the list goes on and on, ranging from physics and cosmology, through low-level electronics and programming, to systems and organization design and applied math concepts.

Oh, and four Nobel Prizes.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU


A late comment, but Bell is the ur-example of this, and a huge, almost ridiculous, amount of innovation came out of Bell Labs.

Aside from the transistor, negative feedback, Unix, troff, radio astronomy, the charge coupled device, cryptography, information theory, what did Bell Labs ever do for us?

And AT&T before them. (Bell Labs)

Yes, what has Bell Labs ever brought us?

And everything that has existed outside Bell Labs and UNIX.

Bell, at the time, had a lot of non-computer pursuits like switches and microwave antennas. Engineering was a lot more than writing code back then.
next

Legal | privacy