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What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs? (hackaday.com)

submitted 2 months ago by 0x0@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] jtl@lemmy.world 70 points 2 months ago

Missing context here is that Bell labs was at its most productive when it was a government backed monopoly, with the govt insisting that it work in the general public benefit. It’s not possible now because that sort of public-private symbiosis has totally fallen out of favour and regulators just don’t really have the teeth to grab the bull by the horns like that anymore.

[-] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 2 months ago

Or to put that another way, it would take putting the teeth back in regulation (among other things).

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 45 points 2 months ago

Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn't unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.

Google had this vibe too, prior to going public.

[-] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)

[-] madnificent@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I don't think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation "Augmenting the Human Intellect" (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).

It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.

[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 25 points 2 months ago

Just use what Bell had before: a monopoly on virtually all communication to pay for crazy ideas and irregular output. Also, stomp out all competition so no one else can make any discoveries of their own. Can't have rivals muddying the history of who invented what.

[-] Laser@feddit.org 44 points 2 months ago

What that monopoly got us: The C programming language, UNIX, UTF-8, among others

What the current tech monopolies yielded: yachts for the upper management

[-] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

Hey now, there's also been a lot of enshitification with the new system.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 months ago

the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.

That's incredibly incorrect.

Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:

Movies with synchronous sound
Text-to-speech
Stereo broadcasts
Radio astronomy
The transistor
Unix
The C programming language
The calculator
Solar electricity
Transatlantic telephone cables
LASER
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)

Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don't have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.

I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

I agree with almost all of it. Surely your grandmother or eldest living non-troglodyte relative has benefitted from transistors and calculators. Even lasers. Probably even Unix, if they use a Mac, as most tech-illiterate do.

However, the silver lining here is that this monopoly actually invested... heavily...into R&D. You don't see that now, not to the levels that they did.

[-] sircac@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

The importance of basic research…

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

A breakthrough in physics that enables a new technology to have all the benefits and zero downsides of our current globally deployed communication standards. Like true wireless energy, or something that can replace undersea cables.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 14 points 2 months ago

Well Google was basically that - it revolutionized search, which made the Internet accessible for casual users

And it worked - Google put more into R&D moon shots than anyone... Except the economic META has changed, and everything innovative just ended up in the Google graveyard before it had a chance to mature

Bell Labs worked because they threw excess piles of money at the best people they could find, and they gave them autonomy. They gave them time, and let them build things with no clear application for their company

Today, that money goes into stock buybacks, executive bonuses, and buying out promising startups. Stock prices this quarter are all that matters, and R&D only raises stock prices when it promises insane growth or quick monetization

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

And, at least from what I recall, the incentive for bell to toss that excess money into research, is the corporate tax rates were so high it would've been taken from them if not spent anyway.

[-] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Well a SWE at Google just won a Nobel in chemistry?

this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024

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