9 ms·
Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)
- kbob 5y agoI found my father-in-law, and I found a guy I went to school with. The former worked in Columbus, Ohio, and the latter was also from Ohio. I wouldn't be surprised if all of Department 375 was in Columbus.
- boulos 5y agoNeat bit of history! I'd have enjoyed seeing one of these for whatever group dmr et al. was in (doesn't seem to be in this one of the "Design Engineering Center 375"). The title got my hopes up that it was all of Bell Labs :(.
- throwaway81523 5y agoDMR's lab number in that era would have been 1127, the famous Computing Science Research Center, for those of you who remember email addresses on "research" (not research.somecompany.com, just "research"). The actual research branch of Bell Labs was area 11, so lab 1127 was two levels down in the org chart. Area 11 itself was headed by Arno Penzias, famous for (with Bob Wilson) co-discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation after finding they couldn't get the last bits of electrical noise out of their microwave antenna output no matter how often they cleaned the bird poop off of it, so they had to look for other sources. He and Wilson won the 1978 physics Nobel for that.
- indigodaddy 5y agoI believe I saw a single female manager. I would imagine that was about average representationally for tech companies of that era?
- jtchang 5y agoInteresting how the organization was broken out. What is the difference between "Engineering Information" and "Computer and Engineering Information" groups?
- riffic 5y agoBell, 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.
- riffic 5y agohope you don't mind me sharing this to a mostly disused subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BellLabs/comments/sagzx8/scans_of_a_bell_labs_org_chart_1980/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BellLabs/comments/sagzx8/scans_of_a... if anyone would like to adopt the subreddit let me know, I'll turn over moderation to anyone interested in preserving this history.
- waynesoftware 5y agoBy chance, has anyone OCR'd it to make the text searchable?
- 1123581321 5y agoHere's a copy that has been OCRed by ABBYY. https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/m-various/bell-labs-directory.pdf https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/m-various/bell-labs-direct...
- Waterluvian 5y agoIf you’re on an iOS device, Safari will search the text in the images which I thought was quite neat. https://ibb.co/7j8kgvs https://ibb.co/7j8kgvs
- it_does_follow 5y agoThis really confirmed visually for me something that I started to think was just in my head: I miss working with adults. Since I've been in tech over 35 was "old", even among "senior" leadership. I had memories of when this wasn't the case (I even worked in a old style office where literally everyone had their own office with a door), but I thought maybe it was just a function of me being much younger then. What's remarkable in these images is that there is a range of ages and at the same time it's obviously not a gerontocracy. I can't remember the last time I worked with someone that had gray hair. The last several teams I've worked with I remember a constant sense of everyone trying to figure out what to do. When you look at resumes you can see why, nearly everyone has worked at one or two places and only worked for at most 5 years. On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with a lot to learn about patience and how to solve hard problems. I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.
- xarope 5y agomany of us are still here, and wonder why these young'uns are reinventing the wheel everytime :-P Other times, I wished to go back to the simpler days of X windows, latex/postscript, instead of this newfangled another-react-framework-that-promises-to-make-things-easier ala xkcd 927
- throwawayboise 5y agoOthers of us became disenchanted and moved on.
- Breza 5y agoI'm a data science department head. I've been trained to divide the world into supervised and unsupervised learning problems. Over the past few years, I've started reading old books, and it's amazing how clever pre-WWW computer scientists were. A few pages of Knuth can reveal a deterministic and fast-running algorithm for a problem that I would otherwise approach with some ML library.
- ibejoeb 5y ago
- systemvoltage 5y agoIt's remarkable how much cash Big Tech has and how little they do with it. They could start massive R&D centers that do fundamental research like Bell Labs. If they return cash to shareholders as stock buybacks, they'd self-indict they're no longer growing. Want innovation in USA? Big Corp needs to invest and employees need to pressure them because shareholders sure as hell wouldn't. Big Tech has little national interest, they're all global international corporations [1] – I really don't mean to start a national interst comment war, I am pointing out that they can invest if they so desire to. As of Nov, Apple has $190B, Alphabet $168B, Microsoft $137B and Amazon $86B in cash [2]. [1] This story got little coverage. $275 Billion. That's more than what Intel just announced yesterday to invest in Ohio. I consider 'The Information' best in class of SV reporting, yet not a peep from any major news source afaik: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chinese-authorities-apple-ceo-signed-275-billion-deal-with-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine... [2] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-companies-stockpile-1-trillion-cash-investors-want-it/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...
- syshum 5y agoWell Microsoft has 68 Billion less now.... ;) but I agree with your comment, most of Silicon Valley has been Anti-American for a number of decades now. They just want to extract from America
- fault1 5y agoWhy should they necessarily put the sole R&D center in America? They are all international companies, unlike the old AT&T.
- syshum 5y agoI would not say they need to put all of them, but some of them would be useful. I do wonder if people would have the same opinion is they were putting those research dollars Russia, or North Korea, etc?
- 5y ago
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoBell has a great historical material just watch the redesign presentation of Saul Basso in the 70s! [0] I had so many marketing meetings with worse presentations just a week ago. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
- Merrill 5y agoA "Center" was managed by a third level manager titled "Director" with "Department Heads" and group "Supervisors" reporting to them. An alternative organizational name was the "Laboratory", also managed by a "Director". Above that were "Divisions" managed by "Executive Directors". Divisions were in "Areas" managed by Vice Presidents, and Vice Presidents reported to Executive Vice Presidents and then to Presidents. This appears to be a Center which prepared the official design documentation that was sent to the engineer for manufacture at Western Electric who would then work out the manufacturing processes need to produce the equipment for the telephone companies. It appears to have supported the Transmission area and the Customer Premises equipment area.
- throwaway81523 5y agoThere are sure a lot of art and drafting groups in that book. I wonder how much of it would now be done by CAD software used directly by circuit designers.
- allthebestforus 5y agoKen?
- howenterprisey 5y ago>excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary First I'm hearing about the inaccuracies. Any more information about that?
- themadturk 5y agoWondering the same. I really enjoyed that book.
- neilpanchal 5y agoI enjoyed the book very much, later found this review [1] that highlights some issues with it. I've updated the article with a link to the review. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10ZINB4B9O5I3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10ZINB4B9O5I3
- schnable 5y agoWhat do the prefixes before the names mean?
- pphysch 5y agoFirst/middle initial The second line is what they go by So Robert S. Williams might be: # R. S. Williams Bob
- imapeopleperson 5y agoWho is D. Millerick Dan?
- sizzzzlerz 5y agoThe Idea Factory, written by John Gertner, covers the almost inconceivable amount of innovation that came out of Bell Labs from the turn of last century to the 1980s. The names of the people who worked there reads like a text of 20th century physics, electrical engineering, and computer science.
- erwincoumans 5y agoTimes have changed a lot for the clothing as well. The suits with shirt and ties are mostly replaced by t-shirts and hoodies, and I haven't seen a tie in Google Research.
- sgt101 5y agoThere's a career hack there - go into work in a suit and tie and stand out from the crowd!
- dave333 5y agoI worked at Bell Labs from mid-1980 until 1990 as a contractor - termed "Resident Visitor" in the org chart. I don't recall our department title but we were at the Indian Hill facility near Naperville IL and worked on the 3B-20D reliable processor and operating system that was supposed to be the core of switching systems. I remember a lot more women in our department in both tech and management roles than the department in the directory. The Research Department in Murray Hill NJ would be the interesting org chart with all the big names of Unix legend. The offices for individual contributors were two persons sharing with kind of T-shaped desk arrangement that made playing backgammon at lunchtime very convenient.
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- sgt101 5y agoWorking on ideas for an organisational design research project I was taken aback by the realisation that the old directories in my organisation were a treasure trove of information on what the organisation was, and how peoples careers evolved in the past. Very upsettingly this treasure trail stopped in 1999 when the intranet took it all online and the data vanished. Does training a cohort have any impact on attrition and career development - we shall never know, short of running a 20 year project. The observational data is gone.
- oaiey 5y agoSo either, this was a very progressive place or it is sad when the directors had a woman directly next to them but without even a role (like secretary or assistant). Seems like the gender was then enough to classify as an assistant on the higher roles. Sad. And second thing: A printed org chart with pictures in it. As if they had a stable work culture for more than one months ... oh wait ... that was normal once ;)
- 627467 5y agoNo one had titles/roles next to their name. The contemporary obsession with identity is ... Sad.
- oxplot 5y agoFrom the text: > I can't name a single thing from Google X or Amazon 126, Apple or Microsoft Research departments. This is a very narrow way of looking at who's making things of value. Let's take a single example out of those companies mentioned: Apple's iPhone and the demand it generated for smartphones, pushed many industries to invest in research, development and mass production of high resolution, low cost, low power screens, low power (and now even faster than desktop workstations) compute in small form factor SoC, ever so small low noise and high resolution camera sensors and lenses, faster, higher bandwidth, cheaper and more widely accessible cell networks, and so on and on and on... Take any single one of the above components/infrastructure and one can list 100 products of value stemming from its cheap and widespread availability. Apple didn't just make a phone, it changed computing forever (something Jobs would probably say on stage) in span of a few years. Also, did you forget https://research.google/ https://research.google/ or just ignored it? There are mind numbing number of research papers *with* corresponding global scale real products used by millions/billions of people, that based on those research. I am sick of people glorifying the past when today, right under their noses, exists orders of magnitude greater research and innovation. Their title may not be sweet and straightforward like "invention of the telephone" but that's how progress works — the more you move forward, the more nuanced and specific things get.
- als0 5y agoAgreed. > Perhaps a faint idea of drones deliveries, balloon weather projects, AR/VR tech, failed chat apps, quantum something, and a lot of PR. This line dismisses the huge achievements in quantum engineering as "quantum something" and, just for example, ignores other high profile breakthroughs like AlphaGo and AlphaFold. I'd also say that many of the profound inventions invented at Bell Labs would not be fully appreciated until decades later, and will be the same case with today's research.
- Hokusai 5y ago> Apple didn't just make a phone, it changed computing forever I though that smartphones were a kind of inevitable outcome of technological advancement, and that many other similar products where already out there. I have to agree that Apple's marketing was spot on, as it still works to this date.
- sadhkjkdasasdh 5y ago
- waynesonfire 5y agoThis company had higher standards for their org chart than our modern production systems. Sheesh, what happened. Sad.
- mynameishere 5y ago
- winstongator 5y agoThis looks a lot like a face book.