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And yet it is the opposite fact, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, which lead to such labs. Most big companies had big R&D efforts during the mid-20th Century,
by lkrubner 4y ago
And yet it is the opposite fact, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, which lead to such labs. Most big companies had big R&D efforts during the mid-20th Century, and that was because the government was unusually aggressive in its anti-monopoly efforts. Big companies couldn't simply buy small, innovative startups. Mergers were less common, and the government examined each for any possible threat to competition. Buying an up-and-coming competitor, to limit competition, was strictly forbidden. So if you wanted to be innovative, you had to build a big lab, and do all the innovation yourself.
- Isamu 4y agoBecause of strict regulations on Ma Bell, Unix was free with all the source code. Universities would request a copy and Ken would send a magtape. And so it began.
- nindalf 4y agoIt’s not like Ma Bell had any competitors they could buy, even if they wanted to. Because they were a complete monopoly. And despite this supposed strong anti-monopoly enforcement, they milked that monopoly for decades. But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.
- biofox 4y agoC, UNIX, radio astronomy, cellular networks, the transistor, integrated circuits, the laser, photovoltaic cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, super resolution microscopy, optical tweezers, error-correcting codes, fibre optic networks...
- fatjokes 4y agoSeriously, when you list it all out it sounds like a reasonable trade.
- kqr 4y agoThe question isn't whether those things are nice, it's whether they wouldn't have been developed as fast in a competitive environment. (Personally, I think just based on human nature that competition is anti-innovative in the long run, but I can't prove anything either way.)
- bluGill 4y agoThe question is what we lost because we did those things. We know what happened, we don't know what alternative histories would have been like. We don't know if they would have been better or worse.
- CamperBob2 4y agoIt's not a perfect answer, but we can look at other industrialized countries where nothing like Bell Labs existed. An easy citation would be CERN. They gave us the WWW, but then CERN is a monopoly in its own right, given that no one else has similar facilities, similar requirements, or a comparable base of talent to draw from. Other than CERN, I'm drawing a blank here. Examples, anyone?
- fatjokes 4y agoI would argue we have examples now: Google Research, Deepmind, MSR, IBM Research, AT&T Labs, FAIR... I would argue that all their combined achievements don't add up to Bell Labs'. (IBM Research Zurich as a couple of Nobels I think). Certainly at least one reason is that these labs have pressure to bring some of their research to market rather than solve for the long term.
- bluGill 4y agoNot at all because all later research was influenced by what went before. And of course all those people doing the work were not doing something else.
- wdkrnls 4y agoDon't forget S was developed at Bell Labs, the mother of R.
- imwillofficial 4y agobell didn’t spring into existence a monopoly. GP described the conditions that grew bell
- deelowe 4y agoSeems like the early CATV operators would have been an easy target for bell.
- lr1970 4y ago> But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it. And transistor [0], laser [1], CCD image sensor [2] to name a few more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Townes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Townes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device#History
- a9h74j 4y agoI heard Townes in a small lecture at Berkeley once. As I recall he described a bit of a struggle getting Bell Labs interested in patenting the maser (or some similar administrative detail). He offered that the key phrase turned out to be: you might be able to use this for communications.