6 ms·

Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)

34 points by selfishgene 7y ago

kybball 7y ago
Ironic that this article is on jstor
- selfishgene 7y ago
  Hope it was one that Aaron Swartz was able to download before MIT arrested him.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    It's on both LibGen and Sci-Hub. Former: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703
for_schwartz 7y ago
Here's a PDF https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703 https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703
- neonate 7y ago
  Also https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-bell-laboratories-and-magnetic-recording.html https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-bell-...
omphalos 7y ago
FYI I see [dead] by your comments. Maybe you have been hell-banned?
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post like this. If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) or email hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix the problem
  - mirimir 7y ago
    OK, but how could I vouch for users? I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that was transgressive. But often enough, nothing. So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Yes. "[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged" only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment. Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while. But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email, as described above. I do this myself on occasion. Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've set "showdead" to on, in your HN profile settings.
      - mirimir 7y ago
        OK, thanks. I'll try it and see how it goes. It's so sad to see banned accounts consistently making interesting and constructive comments, which are mostly all dead, except for the occasional vouched one. And sometimes for years. That's quite the cruel punishment. Being paranoid by nature, I routinely check my account from other IPs whenever my comments aren't getting replies. And I wonder if others do that. I mean, could someone go for a year without realizing that their account had been banned?
dukoid 7y ago
TLDR: "Management feared that the availability of a recording device would make customers less willing to use the telephone system and so undermine the concept of universal service. (...) The fear took two forms. First, if conversations became matters of record in the same way as letters or other contracts, managers felt that customers would abandon the telephone for critical negotiations and return to the mails, where a slip of the tongue would not prove fatal. (...) Second, if conversations could be recorded, matters of an illegal or immoral nature, which some executives estimated made up as much as one third of all calls, would no longer be discussed by phone. (...) Although one might expect that managers would stress the economic half of this equation, in fact they paid far more attention to the question of trust and image. During this period AT&T had constant public relations problems, largely the result of antitrust investigations. Thus, the fact that magnetic recording might create a major upset with only a minor gain for a few customers who could afford to have their calls answered automatically was simply not acceptable for managers concerned with preserving AT&T's good name."
Merrill 7y ago
The 1947 anti-trust lawsuit was settled by the 1956 consent decree which forced AT&T to exit all businesses not related to providing a national telecommunications network and which also required royalty-free licensing of all patents. For example, the Westrex sound recording business for movie production was sold to Litton. This undoubtedly reduced any appetite for deploying any customer premises recording devices which would be similar to recording technology used for entertainment purposes. In fact, telephone answering machines became popular only after the development of low cost Phillips cassette recording technology driven by entertainment markets. Note also that the gating of technology into the Bell System from Bell Laboratories via Western Electric was by design. Bell Labs was set up independently of and funded by AT&T Headquarters and Western Electric. This allowed Bell Labs to research (AT&T) and develop (WECo) technologies independently of short term business needs in order to prevent the Bell Operating Company regulated monopolies from stagnating, and it also prevented the system from being disrupted by short term engineering hacks. What were wanted were big innovations, thoughtfully applied.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  One of the more famous consequences of that 1956 consent decree was Unix, and from it, Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS. A case in which competition and capital actively interfered with creativity and innovation.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Resistance to technological innovation, often by commercial concerns, is all too common. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... As Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is That looks at cases of such opposition in several areas: - Transportation - Communication - Power - Metals - Textile Machinery - Agricultural Machinery - Building
ncmncm 7y ago
IBM's Watson Lab had the same role in preventing innovations from escaping and upsetting stable markets. Hiring up promising PhDs to prevent them working for somebody else, and keeping them busy not developing for anybody else, was its main purpose, so almost everything they did went straight to the shelf. In the '90s, IBM started taking things off the shelf.

34 points by selfishgene 7y ago

kybball 7y ago

Ironic that this article is on jstor

selfishgene 7y ago
Hope it was one that Aaron Swartz was able to download before MIT arrested him.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  It's on both LibGen and Sci-Hub. Former: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F3106703

for_schwartz 7y ago

Here's a PDF https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703 https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3106703

neonate 7y ago
Also https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-bell-laboratories-and-magnetic-recording.html https://fdocuments.net/document/suppressing-innovation-bell-...

omphalos 7y ago

FYI I see [dead] by your comments. Maybe you have been hell-banned?

dang 7y ago
Please don't post like this. If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) or email hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix the problem
- mirimir 7y ago
  OK, but how could I vouch for users? I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that was transgressive. But often enough, nothing. So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Yes. "[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged" only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment. Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while. But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email, as described above. I do this myself on occasion. Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've set "showdead" to on, in your HN profile settings.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      OK, thanks. I'll try it and see how it goes. It's so sad to see banned accounts consistently making interesting and constructive comments, which are mostly all dead, except for the occasional vouched one. And sometimes for years. That's quite the cruel punishment. Being paranoid by nature, I routinely check my account from other IPs whenever my comments aren't getting replies. And I wonder if others do that. I mean, could someone go for a year without realizing that their account had been banned?

dukoid 7y ago

TLDR: "Management feared that the availability of a recording device would make customers less willing to use the telephone system and so undermine the concept of universal service. (...) The fear took two forms. First, if conversations became matters of record in the same way as letters or other contracts, managers felt that customers would abandon the telephone for critical negotiations and return to the mails, where a slip of the tongue would not prove fatal. (...) Second, if conversations could be recorded, matters of an illegal or immoral nature, which some executives estimated made up as much as one third of all calls, would no longer be discussed by phone. (...) Although one might expect that managers would stress the economic half of this equation, in fact they paid far more attention to the question of trust and image. During this period AT&T had constant public relations problems, largely the result of antitrust investigations. Thus, the fact that magnetic recording might create a major upset with only a minor gain for a few customers who could afford to have their calls answered automatically was simply not acceptable for managers concerned with preserving AT&T's good name."

Merrill 7y ago

The 1947 anti-trust lawsuit was settled by the 1956 consent decree which forced AT&T to exit all businesses not related to providing a national telecommunications network and which also required royalty-free licensing of all patents. For example, the Westrex sound recording business for movie production was sold to Litton. This undoubtedly reduced any appetite for deploying any customer premises recording devices which would be similar to recording technology used for entertainment purposes. In fact, telephone answering machines became popular only after the development of low cost Phillips cassette recording technology driven by entertainment markets. Note also that the gating of technology into the Bell System from Bell Laboratories via Western Electric was by design. Bell Labs was set up independently of and funded by AT&T Headquarters and Western Electric. This allowed Bell Labs to research (AT&T) and develop (WECo) technologies independently of short term business needs in order to prevent the Bell Operating Company regulated monopolies from stagnating, and it also prevented the system from being disrupted by short term engineering hacks. What were wanted were big innovations, thoughtfully applied.

dredmorbius 7y ago
One of the more famous consequences of that 1956 consent decree was Unix, and from it, Linux, the BSDs, and MacOS. A case in which competition and capital actively interfered with creativity and innovation.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Resistance to technological innovation, often by commercial concerns, is all too common. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... As Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is That looks at cases of such opposition in several areas: - Transportation - Communication - Power - Metals - Textile Machinery - Agricultural Machinery - Building

ncmncm 7y ago

IBM's Watson Lab had the same role in preventing innovations from escaping and upsetting stable markets. Hiring up promising PhDs to prevent them working for somebody else, and keeping them busy not developing for anybody else, was its main purpose, so almost everything they did went straight to the shelf. In the '90s, IBM started taking things off the shelf.