14 ms·

What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?

335 points by nickwritesit 2y ago

csours 2y ago
Crystals! (Tangent, but fun) Lab Grown Quartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw Alan Holden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4
retrac 2y ago
It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held.
- foobarian 2y ago
  Google or Microsoft are pretty close nowadays. Look at all the infrastructure both of these sponsored over the years. It may not be as foundational as what BL did, but then again there is not as much low hanging fruit today either.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    Also Google and Microsoft for the most part are not even trying to be innovative. Rather they try to milk out every last cent of existing products, driving people to buy their cloud services, or directly or indirectly sell user data to third parties.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      self driving cars and transformers not good enough for you?
      - bobmcnamara 2y ago
        Not when hipsters in my town strand them with a sack of flour.
      - beezlewax 2y ago
        What self driving cars? None of them are up to the task from what I've seen.
        NullHypothesist 2y ago
        Waymo's got an open-to-public service in SF & Phoenix. Testing in LA & Austin now. It works really well, and has been expanding quickly (relatively speaking). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-...
    - nox101 2y ago
      You're saying Google's long work in AI, Quantum Computing, etc... are not trying to be innovative? Their researchers certainly put out a lot of influential papers. https://research.google/ https://research.google/
    - abadpoli 2y ago
      There is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into efforts like making data centers more power efficient, making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don’t hear about it because these private companies have no incentive to share it. And that’s entirely separate from the fact that Generative AI wouldn’t even be a thing if not for the research that Google published.
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    Ma Bell was regulated and they used the labs partly as a slush fund to smooth out their apparent earnings. When they got a rate increase, the labs would be well funded for a while, so AT&T wouldn't have to show an unseemly spike in profits. When they went for a long while without an increase, the labs would run lean until the next increase came. At least that's what someone told me back then.
    - tedunangst 2y ago
      I've read more than one history of bell labs and never heard about this dynamic.
- flenserboy 2y ago
  Tax law would also have to change: https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-credit-and-deducting-rd-expenditures/#:~:text=Under%20I.R.C.,currently%20deduct%20their%20R%26D%20expenses https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-cre....
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    Winner winner chicken dinner. I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way. > The TCJA amended I.R.C. §174 such that, beginning in 2022, firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S., such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those expenses. The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by disincentivizing R&D across the board.
- nkozyra 2y ago
  Rather than a monopoly, I'd say it takes 2 things (that are often present in monopolies): 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no immediate threat from competition #2 drives a lot of the desire to innovate, the hope being that by the time competition catches up, you've got so much new stuff that they're back where they started. The closest thing I can think of in the tech space now is Apple with consumer hardware moat. The other big players are still cannibalizing and copying each other's business segments.
  - trelane 2y ago
    You are forgetting a vital element: the C-suite must want to plow the money into research instead of lining their yachts and various houses with it.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Somewhat less cynical view, but maybe corporations were allowed to be more long term focused in the past?
      - ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Or maybe they had to be, with interest and tax rates what they were?
        bumby 2y ago
        Could you elaborate or be more specific? Given how long BL existed, I’m not sure I can pin down what rates you’re talking about
        gregw2 2y ago
        One of the commenters on the original article said "Bell Labs was funded through a 1% tax on Bell's overall revenue, as well as a claim on a portion of Western Electric's revenue, so yes, AT&T was able to recoup Bell Labs' expenses." This would protect it from (at least certain types of) C-suite predation presumably.
- YouWhy 2y ago
  Thank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world was making progress on their own.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Perhaps you mean the only way they could maintain their monopoly? Bell Labs was Bell's bargaining chip with the government to allow it maintain its market dominance. The government allowed, at least for a long time, the monopoly to persist so long as Bell Labs was acting as a public good. As part of that social contract, Bell was not allowed to capitalize on what Bell Labs produced. I expect Bell Labs is so notable because the public at large was able to take their discoveries and turn them into productive ventures, to which they did. That's not completely unheard of today – LLM-based businesses being a recent example that stem from Google opening up research to the public – but it is unusual for today's research labs to give away everything. Today, not even the research labs with that explicit intent (OpenAI) are willing to give away everything (or much of anything).
- JackFr 2y ago
  The evidence pointing toward monopoly is IBM TJ Watson Research and Xerox Parc.
- threatripper 2y ago
  I wonder if we look back at Meta like this which pours ungodly amounts of Money into VR right now.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Probably, given that they've probably done more open research than anyone else (open compute, llama, basically all of the Big Data stuff came from papers by Google and code from Facebook). They're unlikely to be praised around here, but I think history will potentially be kinder to them.
- sudosays 2y ago
  This makes me think of Meta's approach in open sourcing a lot of their AI efforts. I can't find the exact snippet from the Zuckerberg interview, but the reasoning was: If Meta open sources their models/tools and it gains wide adoption, ways will be found to run the models more efficiently or infrastructure/research built on top of Meta's work will ultimately end up saving them a lot of costs in future. Release the model that cost $10bn to make now, and save yourself billions when others build the tooling to run it at 1/10th the cost.
  - blueboo 2y ago
    It rings a bit false when juxtaposed with their $40b spend on the Metaverse…where was the savvy leveraging of the open source community then? Meanwhile Meta’s competitors commoditise and glean profits from actually-SOTA LLM offerings. In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3?
    - skinner927 2y ago
      The leverage with the Metaverse was eventually users were supposed to create content which in turn makes the product better and brings more users.
    - sudosays 2y ago
      > In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3? I am not sure, but I agree that it is definitely testable. If I had to guess/answer, I would argue that the open source contributions to Pytorch have a downstream contribution to the performance, and maybe the preparation and release of the models required an amount of polish and QA that would otherwise not have been there.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  It would require The Phone Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8
  - jdougan 2y ago
    Such a good movie.
- dreamcompiler 2y ago
  > In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held. In more ways than one. Sandia National Laboratories (mentioned in the article) is a national research laboratory, and since it was managed by AT&T from its inception in 1948 it was organized like Bell Labs. It's no longer managed by AT&T and its culture today feels a lot less like Bell Labs, but in the early days the employees called it "Bell Labs West." Sandia is the only national lab that has an AT&T origin story.
rightbyte 2y ago
Dunno. Essentially AT&T founding is no different than tax founding. Any uni lab could recreate the conditions. I believe the academic system is way too gamed nowadays for these kind of institutions to not drown. Like, there is focus on metrics and numbers rather than fundamentals.
- ertgbnm 2y ago
  The vertical monopoly is the big key. A uni lab couldn't replicate that.
n4r9 2y ago
> Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs. This feels like a big-hitter. In the UK, most government expenditure these days is subject to a sort of KPI management process. It's very difficult to do long-term work when the team has short-term targets to fulfill. That said, I wonder if security-critical organisations like GCHQ work that way. Obviously Bell labs was a US phenomenon, but I'd be surprised if the same problem doesn't persist over there to some degree.
readingnews 2y ago
You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation. We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will not happen.
- iwontberude 2y ago
  Craigslist is an example of where this doesn’t occur but the innovation also doesn’t exist.
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- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Yes, the trillion dollar market cap businesses got to where they are by focusing on short term shareholder profit (what does that even mean?) and dividends. Nvidia famously did not play the long game. Nor did Apple with their smartphone bet, or Amazon with their 10+ years of near zero profit margins while building a nationwide logistics network. Or Alphabet with their data centers, plowing billions into YouTube to give access to streaming HD video on demand around the world.
  - readingnews 2y ago
    All of your examples could be negated, I will just do one as an example: Apple did not spend 20+ years developing the smart phone thinking "I hope this research pays off". The same for the rest of your examples. Bell Labs, OTOH, was literally like "go do fundamental telecom and computer research, and we will see if we can use it to get ahead". Those are two different mindsets. Amazon had one goal so did Nvidia, Google, etc, with each venture you cited. Bell Labs was a _research park_ of exploration that we do not recreate today.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I don’t see how you are negating my counter examples from your claim. If you are classifying decade+ investments as long term, then we will simply have to disagree. >as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation. While things might not be as hunky dory as in the heyday of Bell Labs, I don’t think “everything” is accurately described as short term either.
LarsDu88 2y ago
Google already did this. Google X, Google Brain, Deepmind... The invention of the transformer architecture that underpins modern AI, dozens of core papers in the field. What they haven't revolutionized is materials science. Memristor technology for example, is still grossly underdeveloped.
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- nine_k 2y ago
  Both memristors and 3D XPoint aka Optane are in a patent limbo. The current patent holders tried them, and found the current crop too hard and unprofitable, but further research and commercialization would require either buying the key patents or waiting for them to expire.
  - pklausler 2y ago
    Commercialization, yes, but not necessarily further research.
    - jahewson 2y ago
      Hard to get research funded when it can’t be commercialised sufficiently to merit the risk.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Fundamental research is likely unhindered. But any research of incremental improvements in an attempt to make the tech commercially viable is stymied. And I would love to see some accessible and available non-volatile RAM measured in gigabytes. It means computers that never get switched "of, no more than a paper book can be switched off. It would take a radically different approach to operating syssystems to reap the benefits though.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    That one's on Intel. They marketed Optane poorly and created a subpar product for the market they were tackling. The whole point of memristors is to make something better than DRAM and SRAM. Perhaps even blow up the dichotomy between storage and memory altogether (as memristor MRAM can store information even when powered down, unlike DRAM and SRAM). Let here we are in 2024 with no viable memristor products on the market.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Lots of companies recreated Bell Labs. It's not the 20th century though.
IshKebab 2y ago
A time machine. These places (Xerox Parc is the other obvious example) existed because recent breakthroughs opened up the possibilities and they exploited almost inevitable inventions. I think the mistake is thinking that the flurry of creation is linked to the company or the institution rather than the general state of progress. As soon as someone invents viable Human-Machine Interfaces or whatever there will be some company that invents a load of seminal stuff around that.
- nine_k 2y ago
  It certainly linked to a company or institution that were able to harness the potential and release the innovation as research or products. Not all of them.did. It's like wind energy: the wind blows for everyone, but some build a turbine or a windmill. (Though indeed, when the wind us not blowing, even the best turbine is going to be a disappointment.)
tuatoru 2y ago
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photochemsyn 2y ago
Didn't high top marginal tax rates in the 1960s-1970s era give a lot of corporations an incentive to put profits back into R & D as it would avoid high taxation on those profits (and I think the R & D outlay was a tax writeoff, too). E.g. https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
renewiltord 2y ago
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- fragmede 2y ago
  It's fascinating how Google --transformers--> OpenAI looks like Xerox Parc --gui--> Apple if you squint real hard.
  - drowntoge 2y ago
    While I agree with you, the amount of the squinting required hurts my eyes.
- treyd 2y ago
  Except that's supporting the ego of a particularly questionable billionaire instead of being truly R&D for its own sake in advancing technology.
  - Krustopolis 2y ago
    What is questionable about Peter Thiel?
    - drowntoge 2y ago
      That I'd happily go back to the stone age rather than have him and the likes of him own the tech sector and be left alone in driving it into the next century. And I'm far from alone in feeling this way.
    - treyd 2y ago
      He's closely associated with the Neoreactionary movement (NRx, for more research look up Curtis Yarvin) and coincidentally happens to be on good terms with the new VP pick JD Vance. They see principles like democracy as barriers to achiving personal power and enrichment. It makes a lot of sense he'd build a surveillance firm. Relatively recent article from the Atlantic specifically on Thiel: https://archive.is/1Nz71 https://archive.is/1Nz71 Slightly older article in Vanity Fair that covers his connections with NRx and other topics: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
akira2501 2y ago
What would it take? Two world wars leading a protracted cold war between two "superpowers." No surprise that the end of the cold war brought about the end of our collective need of a closely held quasi-national entity like AT&T. I think the real question is "What would it take to recreate it in the abstract, from the disparate components we have attached to the internet today?" Or to rephrase it "What happened to the early promise of the internet when it was mostly available only through Universities?"
- r_hanz 2y ago
  IMHO, the downfall is singularly: ad revenue. Monetizing your website/app/product indirectly in this way has been the sole source of many (all?) negative emergent features of modern software and products. i.e. a focus on attention in lieu of quality directly incentivizes utilizing things like dark patterns, addictive features, etc.
pipeline_peak 2y ago
Corporate dominance.......Sorry!
vondur 2y ago
At the most basic level it's all about money. ATT had a monopoly on telecom in the US and had the money to set up the research labs. After that you need people that can recognize and fine brilliant people in their respective fields and giving them the resources they need.
jcgrillo 2y ago
I was thinking about a very small version of this topic the other day--how can you re-create the intrinsic motivation of a startup in a large company? My conclusion was you just can't. The combination of scarcity, urgency, and potential opportunity present in startups seems to catalyze something that can't (at least maybe not ethically) be simulated. Maybe in the large what we really need to get it together and pull these things off is immediate existential threat e.g. a world war or crisis of similar magnitude.
Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
Bell Labs and things like it were around when the primary purpose of a business was to make money, and do it healthily, rather than to find a bigger fish. It's no wonder many of these companies were quite old. They created sound businesses. For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. The modern stock market is to blame. If number goes down then the earth is on fire apparently. The other aspect is, why try and innovate yourselves when you can wait for someone else to do it and then try and acquire them? It's short term thinking but that's what business is largely about these days. Maybe this will change with time. I suspect it will as the world is on a track to become more insular again. This may drive innovation at home.
- renegade-otter 2y ago
  Back in the day, people wanted to build a sustainable, long-term business. Now they just want to create profits, and it often happens by dismantling these great decades-old companies brick by brick, until the line don't go up no more. Then you collect your bonus and move on to the next victim. GE and Boeing have been gutted. What valuable company is next? We live in a time when the incentives are ass-backwards. Your customers should be first, your employees second, and only then, all the way in the back, are your shareholders. When the shareholders are placed first, you find yourself in broken, late-stage capitalism.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. AWS/Azure/Google Cloud? Apple Watch/airpods/M processors/Vision Pro? Meta spending tens of billions on VR? Nvidia designing software to advance AI? TSMC and ASML and others working to get chips more efficient and powerful than ever before? Tesla popularizing electric vehicles and establishing charging networks.
nxobject 2y ago
Everyone talks about the monopoly – don't forget the pressure to Do Good Deeds and to look like You're Bringing New Tech to avoid the general public's grumbling about, well, having to rent your phone from Ma Bell for $$$$$ and to live with their restrictions on what you could hook up to their lines. An expensive PR operation, but a good one for sure. I prefer cynical explanations for why the C-suite would like to keep Bell Labs around, and other posters have also mentioned managing perceived profits, and avoiding anti-trust.
mhneu 2y ago
The key thing is time horizon. Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly. (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus on short-term stock prices.) It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it does. You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most. The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's all funded by the government.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  Agreed on the public-private nature of Bell Labs. I would also ask how we could recreate another exemplar in that space, DARPA. Now of course DARPA is alive and kicking, but what about another DARPA, say in Europe? The two organizations did have different missions, with DARPA being mostly an investor while Bell Labs was mostly a practitioner. The question that springs to mind is, why did Bell Labs decay while DARPA did not?
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Altos Labs, which specializes on a very complicated topic (anti-aging, longevity), is fully privately funded, though. Even Bezos can look 20 years into the future and doesn't want to die.
colinng 2y ago
We don’t need to recreate Bell Labs. We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I. We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.) What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode. We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.
ayakang31415 2y ago
Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I always thought that private sector alone cannot make technological progress fast without the help of the government sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard because of their genuine interest in working on such projects because they either like the process of figuring things out or their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income, job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a good match for the type of person who excels at basic research. Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of crowd. Public entities are best suited to providing this type of compensation and employment arrangement.
  - navbaker 2y ago
    That sounds exactly like my employer, the JHU Applied Physics Lab. We’re a university affiliated research center, so we aren’t tied to the government pay scale and can provide a better career advancement outlook.
    - caddemon 2y ago
      Don't grants still tie you to government pay structures? I know in biology most academic research labs may as well be government entities because that's the main way to get funding, and that funding has various rules attached including e.g. the max pay for a postdoc.
      - navbaker 2y ago
        No, we don’t get funding through grants. Our work is either direct sponsored work or internal research funded through overhead. We aren’t a federally funded R&D center like Laurence Livermore or MIT Lincoln Labs, we are a university affiliated research center. We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get tenure, while also getting to push real products out to our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid off because we didn’t meet some growth number for the quarter.
unkoman 2y ago
From a non-tech perspective, IKEA, as a private company, shares a similar focus with Bell Labs on enhancing individual components to improve the overall system.
- nox101 2y ago
  What are some examples? What I've noticed buying Ikea stuff over the last 30 years so that it's gotten progressively lower-quality. Take for example their Kallax shelves. I've purchased them at least 4 times in the last 20 years, each time, a part that was metal before got replaced by a plastic or wood part, the wood got thinner or less dense, .... They still work so maybe that's innovative.
WalterBright 2y ago
Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by removing its core principles. Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.
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- LarsDu88 2y ago
  SpaceX doesn't really do any sort of frontier research. They do technology. They are taking concepts that have been done in the past and doing them more economically. They have pushed the state-of-the art with projects like Raptor-2, but doing fundamental research and simply doing engineering are different things.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    Skunk works also did technology
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      The radar-invisible shapes came from a Soviet research paper!
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    The C programming language was a successor of other programming languages, too. Not a completely new entity, the first programming language of the world. Innovations that aren't on the frontier of knowledge, but have great potential for mass deployment, are precisely those that tend to have the biggest impact on humanity as such.
WalterBright 2y ago
I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about: 1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler? 2. would I need a license to call it C++? So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't notice. So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago
  Ironically wholesome lawyer story. That's a short list btw.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is him: https://www.forbisanddick.com/obituaries/William-Bill-Ryan-2/#!/Obituary https://www.forbisanddick.com/obituaries/William-Bill-Ryan-2...
    - NetOpWibby 2y ago
      Damn, RIP.
- vinnyvichy 2y ago
  Thanks for the story, it illustrates the lack of cynicism in all ranks, compared to Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today. I like reasons and conditions, but reproducing culture takes a lot more work. Though one feels the character and actions of Mervin Kelly were crucial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervin_Kelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervin_Kelly
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today. Probably an unrelated question, but why the "or even" caveat for OpenAI? They claimed to be an open non-profit, cynicism seems warranted at a level even moreso than Microsoft and Google.
GreedIsGood 2y ago
None of this addresses perhaps the main issue. Bell Labs predated the venture capital revolution of the 1970s. The key insight of venture capital was that firms like Bell Labs were holding on to very valuable resources at compensation rates that were far below what those resources could generate if they were empowered to create their own firms. This was tremendously successful. While we have no counterfactual, innovation in the US blosomed ove the last 50 years. The fundamental research may have languished (I would probably disagree, moore's law didn't happen through magic for example) a tremendous number of companies, and all of the large companies we know of today, which provide all of the services of the modern world were a result of venture capital.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
  I'm not sure that last part lands quite the way you meant it to.
- coliveira 2y ago
  Moore's law is dead in the USA for almost 20 years. The improvements we see come from research in Asia and the Netherlands. Also the idea that US tech companies are doing much innovation is debatable. They are designing products for the international markets, but the core technologies are more and more coming from Asia.
  - shrubble 2y ago
    ASML is using basic research that was funded by the US government; that is why the US has the ability to veto/restrict who ASML sells the encumbered EUV and related other tech innovations, to.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      Yes, the research was initially done in the US. The current research and development is now done by the group in Netherlands. There is nothing in the US that comes close to what they have now.
WalterBright 2y ago
Thomas Edison invented the first commercial invention laboratory. The Wright Bros invented the first directed research and development program, where theories are developed and tested on a series of prototypes, leading towards the objective.
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ge96 2y ago
a ranch and infinite money
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kkfx 2y ago
What made Bell Labs so successful is simple: - public funds - researchers free to research instead of producing something marketable in 6 months or less - long term projects and goals as a NORMAL thing instead of being considered folly - a school system designed to make citizens not useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... Unfortunately the last point in the present time demand IN THEORY at least some new generations to be achieved, in practice the ruling class do not want at all anything like that so it's mere utopia. As a bottomline: EU was the most advanced countries of the world, when it do public funded research and industry, it commit suicide with WWI, the USA have copied and advance the EU model after WWII, then commit suicide as well with finaciarisation of anything, now it's China who rule, but the model, the substance is the same: countries grow and prosper with public funded research with long terms goals and researchers free to master themselves with the industry picking marketable research from them instead of commanding research. Countries might vary, populations might vary, implementations might vary a bit, but the principle so far have proved to be the same. As a result we are in a decline phase, which probably result in a series of LOST wars, and a long era of poverty and destruction before a new start.
jofer 2y ago
Big oil arguably had some of the closest up until the past ~10 years. I think folks may not realize how large Exxon and Shell's pure R&D labs are/were. The other majors have cut much more heavily on pure R&D in the past 20 years, but Exxon and Shell have always focused on pure research fairly heavily. It's been cut back in the past 10-ish years, but the R&D labs at both are still present. The breadth of it is significant, and while sure, it's geology, metallurgy, chemistry, etc (i.e. it's not what folks here likely think of as "tech"), it is fundamental research as opposed to applied research. A lot doesn't sure up under their R&D best because it's combined with internal consulting, but it's still a large group of folks hired to do r&d with diverse backgrounds. Those labs still exist today, but they're not as large as what they were in the recent past (e.g. 2010), and especially compared to their heyday in the 70's.
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  Considering what those companies did with the most valuable research they ever produced, the climate predictions, they don't seem particularly worthy of emulation.
mcarmichael 2y ago
An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the number of qualified operators needed to scale out to a fully national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound business. The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well here: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q4/economic_history https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus... AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible (switching). For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might otherwise be confusing: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS'_PORTRAYAL_OF_SWITCHING_AS_COMPUTING_OR_NOT https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
The gent in the photo was my postdoctoral advisor at Murray Hill. He's standing by the first CO2 laser which he invented and that was still in the lab I worked in when I was there.
- riemannzeta 2y ago
  Very cool. What did you use it for?
  - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    The laser was 30 years old at the time and kept in expectation that it would go to a museum, perhaps to the Smithsonian or equivalent. I didn't use it in my work. My advisor's retired technician would still come in once every couple of weeks because of his love for the Labs. Towards the end of my stay he and I put in fresh gas tanks and fired it up. All the 1960s vintage glass, power supplies, mechanical and optomechanical systems worked and it lased like a champ and made firebrick beam dumps glow. I don't know what became of it.
    - riemannzeta 2y ago
      It became a legend.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Timing + Infinite Money This was only possible during what was an unprecedented revolutionary time in scientific discovery which allowed for the possibility 1925 - 2000 was the most revolutionary time across all fields of science, probably ever. It's mind boggling the progress made in that period. We will likely not see a repeat until someone comes up with a quantum-classical unifying law and the resultant blowing open of all possibilities of engineering
gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
Another alien crash.
kredd 2y ago
People who are more familiar with Bell Labs — what was the compensation and life was like when one worked there? Were there any extremely alluring alternatives like FAANG of the day, where even a bottom line individual contributor can save a decent chunk of money after half a decade of work? It’s hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay so much more. Can’t even blame them, as it’s extremely high risk with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but still.
- fhd2 2y ago
  I dunno about that. I'm regularly _flabbergasted_ by what hackers will do just for fun, and how they run circles around an industry veteran like me. Look at the modding scene for games (an extreme example being a 30 year old obscure German game called "Gothic" where the modding community is still building amazing stuff on top of this ancient piece of software). Look at 3D printing, or people dabbling with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Look at the Emacs community and all the packages people build with a level of attention to detail you rarely find in commercial software. Those people are all doing it for fun. That's my dictionary definition of "extremely talented and motivated people". The world is big, and I figure those kinds of people would happily work in a place where they can put their talents to use full time for a livable wage. Provided they don't feel like they got the short end of the stick compared to their colleagues/managers, financially or otherwise, maybe. Probably not in the average tech company bureaucracy with all the overhead, micro management, politics and user-hostile antics though.
jhoechtl 2y ago
Technicians in the lead instead marketing men. Public money instead short fad hunting venture capital
- fragmede 2y ago
  OpenAI was founded in 2015. That's long time for venture capital to wait for possibly getting ChatGPT out there.
jschveibinz 2y ago
Bell Labs R&D budget in today's dollars would be about $1.5 billion. Google is closer to $10 billion, with DARPA around $3 billion and NASA at $10-15 billion. The total budget for all national labs is $12 billion. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-budgets-of-1970s.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...
revskill 2y ago
Lol, i think C++ is main reason of decline for Bell Labs due to crash.
Duanemclemore 2y ago
If you haven't you HAVE to read "The Idea Factory" by Gertner which was linked in the article. I think the conditions that led to Bell Labs contrast quite well with the "Shareholder Supremacy" episodes of Ed Zitron's "Better Offline" that just played. You can read pre-Welch GE (or 10x better Bell Labs) as the opposite of the aspects of business that Zitron rails against there.
ggm 2y ago
I'm not convinced you'd be able to replicate because it was a product of time and place. Mike Lesk, who worked at Bell (he implemented uucp, his motivation was purely to provide patch distribution according to what he told me) said one of the key experiences he took from Bell was how easy it is to occupy a vacuum and how hard it is to push aside established state. Unix exists. X11 exists. Kuberbetes exists. Gmail exists. Recreating a small team of highly accomplished experts with motivations which are not aimed at VC ipo, who are mutually trusting, and who have a beneficent employer with nation scale infrastructure they can burn to support you, and you still have the problem there's no vacuum, you're pushing aside other stuff. Giving birth to C and Unix in the ashes of BCPL and multics with the pdp11 as an architecture, that's a huge one time thing. Invent a time machine and it might not happen the same the second time round.
consp 2y ago
Bell Labs is not unique though. We had NatLab (Natuurkundig laboratorium, physics laboratory) at Philips. It's the birth place of the compact cassette and compact disk and did a lot of fundamental research. The main reason for its closure is usually cited as decentralized funding techniques icw economic downturn, though the betting in the wrong technique in the '90s sure didnt help (e.g. better flat crts instead of lcd).
max_ 2y ago
I wrote a review of a book which describes to me the best strategy for recreating Bell Labs like phenomena [0] [0]: https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-review/ https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-revie...
dredmorbius 2y ago
I've seen this question pop up periodically, usually addressed in the context of a single, usually historical, example. Bell Labs seems to most often get the nod as the canonical "Blue Sky" corporate R&D lab, though Xerox, DuPont, and IBM are others. DuPont specifically is the subject of a book by David A. Hounshell, Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902--1980. I'd suggest a broader consideration: - What are examples of extant or historical commercial R&D labs? - What large monopolistic companies haven't developed a significant R&D reputation, either for failure to establish a significant such operation, or a failure to develop awareness of their operation? - What business sectors generally have failed to establish a strong R&D tradition? I'm not going to go into a full answer for obvious reasons (a full response would be an interesting PhD thesis or course of study, not an HN comment), but we can outline some interesting aspects... The companies which did establish large R&D labs have tended to be in high-tech areas, largely information technology though also chemical and hardware fields (DuPont, arguably Xerox). Specifically I'm aware of: Bell Labs (AT&T), PARC (Xerox), IBM Research, Kodak Research Laboratories, DuPont Central Resource, RCA Labs, General Electric Research Lab, Westinghouse Research Labs. Notably absent from singificant US industrial history: Railroads, shipbuilding, Steelmaking (e.g., US Steel), oil (Standard Oil), electric power utilities generally, and the financial services industry. The aerospace sector stands out for having far less major corporate R&D research (or prominence) than one might otherwise expect. That's not to say that there are no such operations: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman all have R&D operations. A possibly explanation is that to a major extent Nasa and US military branches effectively provide R&D cover for the sector. My general sense is that there's less such activity in the sourcing sectors --- agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock --- than might be expected, though Bayer (including Monsanto), Syngenta, DuPont, BASF, Cargill, and John Deere do have some activity. Again government research is significant (e.g., USDA, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), and significiant academic research (land grant universities in the US). Manufacturing, construction, and transportation generally seem to have a weak presence. To the extent that auto safety labs exist, many are strongly supported by the insurance sector. Device certification (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) are strongly similar. Both also see government consumer / product safety operations. Healthcare research tends to be organised around government units, academic research, and specifically-organised new-product (mostly pharmaceuticals, though also devices and processes) commercial operations, the latter often spin-offs of larger established pharmaceutical companies as a risk-isolation / diversification process. (Organisation of Novo Nordisk, recently notably for Ozempic, is its own fascinating story.) My general sense is that wholesale, retail, and financial services have little R&D in in the spirit of Bell Labs and similar Blue Skies research. There's quite a bit of tightly-focused product development, applied, and targeted research, but in scope, spirit, and freedom that's quite a different approach. There's some R&D in academic settings (retail/shopping behaviours, e.g.), or by government (the US Federal Reserve and the monetary system, adjunct to the financial sector). Teasing out some general trends, corporate Blue Sky research seems to be favoured by: - High tech fields, notably information technology, electronics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and to a lesser extent aerospace and energy research. - Less favourable sectors: traditional manufacturing, utilities, wholesale & retail trade, heavy industry, extractive industries, and transportation. - A strong and long-term stable corporate structure. Note that AT&T was initially founded in 1885, whilst Bell Labs wasn't established until 1925, 40 years later. DuPont preexisted its own labs by a century (founded in 1803 and 1903 respectively). RCA (1919) predated its labs (1942) by 23 years. Xerox (1906) predated PARC (1970) by 64 years. Labs don't spring up overnight, and even large and technical companies might not form labs if their tenure is short. - Monopolistic tendencies. Labs tend to form around monopolies, though this may be derivative of longevity. Not all monopolies form labs. - Payoffs to R&D. In Hounshell's book on DuPont, much is made of the comparative fecundity and sterility of early (1930s) and later (1960s, 1970s) research. Effectively, the viable product search space had much early low-hanging fruit, particularly in the 1930s (most plastics we know of today were discovered over roughly a decade), and the failure to find marketable products or enhancements by the 1960s (notably a synthetic "leather" product, "Corfam"). - Insufficient or ineffective government-lead or academic research. In numerous fields, the most significant R&D still occurs in government / academic settings. - Corporate mentality and mindset, possibly. There seem to be fields, including those with significant research potential in which R&D and sharing cultures simply don't exist to any great extent. I'd put finance and insurance in this group. "Why" remains a good question.
3298479328 2y ago
1. LSD hippie culture/aftermath 2. Pre-privatised/embryonic technology industry 3. A few geniuses The question implies time travel, better to look to the future
inglor_cz 2y ago
To a degree, SpaceX is modern equivalent of Bell Labs when it comes to space technology. They attracted a lot of frighteningly smart people and untied their hands. When thinking about Bell Labs etc., I often come to the conclusion that barriers matter more than anything else. If you force your engineers and scientists to hold long pointless conferences and produce some papers on regular schedule, plus submit their various work-related demands to an arbitrary set of rules and decision-makers, the result is similar to throwing sand into a mechanical machine. But these limitations usually exist because of money shortage / funding, and few people or organizations have enough money to just shower them on their eggheads, like Bell Labs once did.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
It would require dismantling, or at least scaling down, fintech, because that's where many smart people end up - the ones who would have been inventing Cool New Stuff if they hadn't been co-opted into working as quants. There have been at least two lost generations of fundamental research because of this.
betaporter 2y ago
A marginal tax rate that discourages profit hoarding. Any other answer is just wrong.
NickNaraghi 2y ago
For those who would like to read more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner[0] - one of my all time favorite books. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory
ricksunny 2y ago
I would like to ask Col.Karl Nell (ret.) who was working there during Bell Labs' trivestiture: (timestsmped): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75
vt85 2y ago
[dead]
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Probably a top ten mistake by the government to break up bell labs.
shockleyje 2y ago
I'm the last relative of William Shockley (cited in the story) who's still in the industry. I like the way this story portrays his success in solving open-ended problems as long as they aligned with the company direction. I've personally never made that connection between us, but it resonates with where I've personally found success, and currently am, in my career as well. Fortunately, a lot of our beliefs about the world are quite different.
sp_nster 2y ago
I'll leave this here. AT&T Labs is still doing interesting things. https://about.att.com/sites/labs https://about.att.com/sites/labs
commandlinefan 2y ago
Well, that's an easy question to answer: it would take more standup meetings, more status reports, more story point estimation, more mandatory spyware, more quarterly (or monthly!) goal setting, more planning poker, more sprint retros and way more non-technical middle management. That is, after all, the only path to Agility. If it's not working, you're not doing it hard enough.
- mewse 2y ago
  It's kind of impressive how rapidly and how many rote processes built up around what began as "[We value] individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
kidfkj 2y ago
[flagged]
porsche4664 2y ago
[flagged]

335 points by nickwritesit 2y ago

Crystals! (Tangent, but fun) Lab Grown Quartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw Alan Holden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4

retrac 2y ago

It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held.

foobarian 2y ago
Google or Microsoft are pretty close nowadays. Look at all the infrastructure both of these sponsored over the years. It may not be as foundational as what BL did, but then again there is not as much low hanging fruit today either.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Also Google and Microsoft for the most part are not even trying to be innovative. Rather they try to milk out every last cent of existing products, driving people to buy their cloud services, or directly or indirectly sell user data to third parties.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    self driving cars and transformers not good enough for you?
    - bobmcnamara 2y ago
      Not when hipsters in my town strand them with a sack of flour.
    - beezlewax 2y ago
      What self driving cars? None of them are up to the task from what I've seen.
      - NullHypothesist 2y ago
        Waymo's got an open-to-public service in SF & Phoenix. Testing in LA & Austin now. It works really well, and has been expanding quickly (relatively speaking). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-cars-...
  - nox101 2y ago
    You're saying Google's long work in AI, Quantum Computing, etc... are not trying to be innovative? Their researchers certainly put out a lot of influential papers. https://research.google/ https://research.google/
  - abadpoli 2y ago
    There is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into efforts like making data centers more power efficient, making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don’t hear about it because these private companies have no incentive to share it. And that’s entirely separate from the fact that Generative AI wouldn’t even be a thing if not for the research that Google published.
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  Ma Bell was regulated and they used the labs partly as a slush fund to smooth out their apparent earnings. When they got a rate increase, the labs would be well funded for a while, so AT&T wouldn't have to show an unseemly spike in profits. When they went for a long while without an increase, the labs would run lean until the next increase came. At least that's what someone told me back then.
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    I've read more than one history of bell labs and never heard about this dynamic.
flenserboy 2y ago
Tax law would also have to change: https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-credit-and-deducting-rd-expenditures/#:~:text=Under%20I.R.C.,currently%20deduct%20their%20R%26D%20expenses https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-cre....
- mullingitover 2y ago
  Winner winner chicken dinner. I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way. > The TCJA amended I.R.C. §174 such that, beginning in 2022, firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S., such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those expenses. The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by disincentivizing R&D across the board.
nkozyra 2y ago
Rather than a monopoly, I'd say it takes 2 things (that are often present in monopolies): 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no immediate threat from competition #2 drives a lot of the desire to innovate, the hope being that by the time competition catches up, you've got so much new stuff that they're back where they started. The closest thing I can think of in the tech space now is Apple with consumer hardware moat. The other big players are still cannibalizing and copying each other's business segments.
- trelane 2y ago
  You are forgetting a vital element: the C-suite must want to plow the money into research instead of lining their yachts and various houses with it.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Somewhat less cynical view, but maybe corporations were allowed to be more long term focused in the past?
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      Or maybe they had to be, with interest and tax rates what they were?
      - bumby 2y ago
        Could you elaborate or be more specific? Given how long BL existed, I’m not sure I can pin down what rates you’re talking about
        gregw2 2y ago
        One of the commenters on the original article said "Bell Labs was funded through a 1% tax on Bell's overall revenue, as well as a claim on a portion of Western Electric's revenue, so yes, AT&T was able to recoup Bell Labs' expenses." This would protect it from (at least certain types of) C-suite predation presumably.
YouWhy 2y ago
Thank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world was making progress on their own.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Perhaps you mean the only way they could maintain their monopoly? Bell Labs was Bell's bargaining chip with the government to allow it maintain its market dominance. The government allowed, at least for a long time, the monopoly to persist so long as Bell Labs was acting as a public good. As part of that social contract, Bell was not allowed to capitalize on what Bell Labs produced. I expect Bell Labs is so notable because the public at large was able to take their discoveries and turn them into productive ventures, to which they did. That's not completely unheard of today – LLM-based businesses being a recent example that stem from Google opening up research to the public – but it is unusual for today's research labs to give away everything. Today, not even the research labs with that explicit intent (OpenAI) are willing to give away everything (or much of anything).
JackFr 2y ago
The evidence pointing toward monopoly is IBM TJ Watson Research and Xerox Parc.
threatripper 2y ago
I wonder if we look back at Meta like this which pours ungodly amounts of Money into VR right now.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Probably, given that they've probably done more open research than anyone else (open compute, llama, basically all of the Big Data stuff came from papers by Google and code from Facebook). They're unlikely to be praised around here, but I think history will potentially be kinder to them.
sudosays 2y ago
This makes me think of Meta's approach in open sourcing a lot of their AI efforts. I can't find the exact snippet from the Zuckerberg interview, but the reasoning was: If Meta open sources their models/tools and it gains wide adoption, ways will be found to run the models more efficiently or infrastructure/research built on top of Meta's work will ultimately end up saving them a lot of costs in future. Release the model that cost $10bn to make now, and save yourself billions when others build the tooling to run it at 1/10th the cost.
- blueboo 2y ago
  It rings a bit false when juxtaposed with their $40b spend on the Metaverse…where was the savvy leveraging of the open source community then? Meanwhile Meta’s competitors commoditise and glean profits from actually-SOTA LLM offerings. In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3?
  - skinner927 2y ago
    The leverage with the Metaverse was eventually users were supposed to create content which in turn makes the product better and brings more users.
  - sudosays 2y ago
    > In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3? I am not sure, but I agree that it is definitely testable. If I had to guess/answer, I would argue that the open source contributions to Pytorch have a downstream contribution to the performance, and maybe the preparation and release of the models required an amount of polish and QA that would otherwise not have been there.
DonHopkins 2y ago
It would require The Phone Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8
- jdougan 2y ago
  Such a good movie.
dreamcompiler 2y ago
> In hindsight it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that happened to be privately held. In more ways than one. Sandia National Laboratories (mentioned in the article) is a national research laboratory, and since it was managed by AT&T from its inception in 1948 it was organized like Bell Labs. It's no longer managed by AT&T and its culture today feels a lot less like Bell Labs, but in the early days the employees called it "Bell Labs West." Sandia is the only national lab that has an AT&T origin story.

rightbyte 2y ago

Dunno. Essentially AT&T founding is no different than tax founding. Any uni lab could recreate the conditions. I believe the academic system is way too gamed nowadays for these kind of institutions to not drown. Like, there is focus on metrics and numbers rather than fundamentals.

ertgbnm 2y ago
The vertical monopoly is the big key. A uni lab couldn't replicate that.

n4r9 2y ago

> Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs. This feels like a big-hitter. In the UK, most government expenditure these days is subject to a sort of KPI management process. It's very difficult to do long-term work when the team has short-term targets to fulfill. That said, I wonder if security-critical organisations like GCHQ work that way. Obviously Bell labs was a US phenomenon, but I'd be surprised if the same problem doesn't persist over there to some degree.

readingnews 2y ago

You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation. We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will not happen.

iwontberude 2y ago
Craigslist is an example of where this doesn’t occur but the innovation also doesn’t exist.
deleted 2y ago
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lotsofpulp 2y ago
Yes, the trillion dollar market cap businesses got to where they are by focusing on short term shareholder profit (what does that even mean?) and dividends. Nvidia famously did not play the long game. Nor did Apple with their smartphone bet, or Amazon with their 10+ years of near zero profit margins while building a nationwide logistics network. Or Alphabet with their data centers, plowing billions into YouTube to give access to streaming HD video on demand around the world.
- readingnews 2y ago
  All of your examples could be negated, I will just do one as an example: Apple did not spend 20+ years developing the smart phone thinking "I hope this research pays off". The same for the rest of your examples. Bell Labs, OTOH, was literally like "go do fundamental telecom and computer research, and we will see if we can use it to get ahead". Those are two different mindsets. Amazon had one goal so did Nvidia, Google, etc, with each venture you cited. Bell Labs was a _research park_ of exploration that we do not recreate today.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I don’t see how you are negating my counter examples from your claim. If you are classifying decade+ investments as long term, then we will simply have to disagree. >as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation. While things might not be as hunky dory as in the heyday of Bell Labs, I don’t think “everything” is accurately described as short term either.

LarsDu88 2y ago

Google already did this. Google X, Google Brain, Deepmind... The invention of the transformer architecture that underpins modern AI, dozens of core papers in the field. What they haven't revolutionized is materials science. Memristor technology for example, is still grossly underdeveloped.

deleted 2y ago
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nine_k 2y ago
Both memristors and 3D XPoint aka Optane are in a patent limbo. The current patent holders tried them, and found the current crop too hard and unprofitable, but further research and commercialization would require either buying the key patents or waiting for them to expire.
- pklausler 2y ago
  Commercialization, yes, but not necessarily further research.
  - jahewson 2y ago
    Hard to get research funded when it can’t be commercialised sufficiently to merit the risk.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Fundamental research is likely unhindered. But any research of incremental improvements in an attempt to make the tech commercially viable is stymied. And I would love to see some accessible and available non-volatile RAM measured in gigabytes. It means computers that never get switched "of, no more than a paper book can be switched off. It would take a radically different approach to operating syssystems to reap the benefits though.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  That one's on Intel. They marketed Optane poorly and created a subpar product for the market they were tackling. The whole point of memristors is to make something better than DRAM and SRAM. Perhaps even blow up the dichotomy between storage and memory altogether (as memristor MRAM can store information even when powered down, unlike DRAM and SRAM). Let here we are in 2024 with no viable memristor products on the market.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Lots of companies recreated Bell Labs. It's not the 20th century though.

IshKebab 2y ago

A time machine. These places (Xerox Parc is the other obvious example) existed because recent breakthroughs opened up the possibilities and they exploited almost inevitable inventions. I think the mistake is thinking that the flurry of creation is linked to the company or the institution rather than the general state of progress. As soon as someone invents viable Human-Machine Interfaces or whatever there will be some company that invents a load of seminal stuff around that.

nine_k 2y ago
It certainly linked to a company or institution that were able to harness the potential and release the innovation as research or products. Not all of them.did. It's like wind energy: the wind blows for everyone, but some build a turbine or a windmill. (Though indeed, when the wind us not blowing, even the best turbine is going to be a disappointment.)

tuatoru 2y ago

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photochemsyn 2y ago

Didn't high top marginal tax rates in the 1960s-1970s era give a lot of corporations an incentive to put profits back into R & D as it would avoid high taxation on those profits (and I think the R & D outlay was a tax writeoff, too). E.g. https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...

renewiltord 2y ago

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fragmede 2y ago
It's fascinating how Google --transformers--> OpenAI looks like Xerox Parc --gui--> Apple if you squint real hard.
- drowntoge 2y ago
  While I agree with you, the amount of the squinting required hurts my eyes.
treyd 2y ago
Except that's supporting the ego of a particularly questionable billionaire instead of being truly R&D for its own sake in advancing technology.
- Krustopolis 2y ago
  What is questionable about Peter Thiel?
  - drowntoge 2y ago
    That I'd happily go back to the stone age rather than have him and the likes of him own the tech sector and be left alone in driving it into the next century. And I'm far from alone in feeling this way.
  - treyd 2y ago
    He's closely associated with the Neoreactionary movement (NRx, for more research look up Curtis Yarvin) and coincidentally happens to be on good terms with the new VP pick JD Vance. They see principles like democracy as barriers to achiving personal power and enrichment. It makes a lot of sense he'd build a surveillance firm. Relatively recent article from the Atlantic specifically on Thiel: https://archive.is/1Nz71 https://archive.is/1Nz71 Slightly older article in Vanity Fair that covers his connections with NRx and other topics: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...

akira2501 2y ago

What would it take? Two world wars leading a protracted cold war between two "superpowers." No surprise that the end of the cold war brought about the end of our collective need of a closely held quasi-national entity like AT&T. I think the real question is "What would it take to recreate it in the abstract, from the disparate components we have attached to the internet today?" Or to rephrase it "What happened to the early promise of the internet when it was mostly available only through Universities?"

r_hanz 2y ago
IMHO, the downfall is singularly: ad revenue. Monetizing your website/app/product indirectly in this way has been the sole source of many (all?) negative emergent features of modern software and products. i.e. a focus on attention in lieu of quality directly incentivizes utilizing things like dark patterns, addictive features, etc.

pipeline_peak 2y ago

Corporate dominance.......Sorry!

vondur 2y ago

At the most basic level it's all about money. ATT had a monopoly on telecom in the US and had the money to set up the research labs. After that you need people that can recognize and fine brilliant people in their respective fields and giving them the resources they need.

jcgrillo 2y ago

I was thinking about a very small version of this topic the other day--how can you re-create the intrinsic motivation of a startup in a large company? My conclusion was you just can't. The combination of scarcity, urgency, and potential opportunity present in startups seems to catalyze something that can't (at least maybe not ethically) be simulated. Maybe in the large what we really need to get it together and pull these things off is immediate existential threat e.g. a world war or crisis of similar magnitude.

Philip-J-Fry 2y ago

Bell Labs and things like it were around when the primary purpose of a business was to make money, and do it healthily, rather than to find a bigger fish. It's no wonder many of these companies were quite old. They created sound businesses. For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. The modern stock market is to blame. If number goes down then the earth is on fire apparently. The other aspect is, why try and innovate yourselves when you can wait for someone else to do it and then try and acquire them? It's short term thinking but that's what business is largely about these days. Maybe this will change with time. I suspect it will as the world is on a track to become more insular again. This may drive innovation at home.

renegade-otter 2y ago
Back in the day, people wanted to build a sustainable, long-term business. Now they just want to create profits, and it often happens by dismantling these great decades-old companies brick by brick, until the line don't go up no more. Then you collect your bonus and move on to the next victim. GE and Boeing have been gutted. What valuable company is next? We live in a time when the incentives are ass-backwards. Your customers should be first, your employees second, and only then, all the way in the back, are your shareholders. When the shareholders are placed first, you find yourself in broken, late-stage capitalism.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
> For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. AWS/Azure/Google Cloud? Apple Watch/airpods/M processors/Vision Pro? Meta spending tens of billions on VR? Nvidia designing software to advance AI? TSMC and ASML and others working to get chips more efficient and powerful than ever before? Tesla popularizing electric vehicles and establishing charging networks.

nxobject 2y ago

Everyone talks about the monopoly – don't forget the pressure to Do Good Deeds and to look like You're Bringing New Tech to avoid the general public's grumbling about, well, having to rent your phone from Ma Bell for $$$$$ and to live with their restrictions on what you could hook up to their lines. An expensive PR operation, but a good one for sure. I prefer cynical explanations for why the C-suite would like to keep Bell Labs around, and other posters have also mentioned managing perceived profits, and avoiding anti-trust.

mhneu 2y ago

The key thing is time horizon. Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly. (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus on short-term stock prices.) It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it does. You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most. The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's all funded by the government.

jackcosgrove 2y ago
Agreed on the public-private nature of Bell Labs. I would also ask how we could recreate another exemplar in that space, DARPA. Now of course DARPA is alive and kicking, but what about another DARPA, say in Europe? The two organizations did have different missions, with DARPA being mostly an investor while Bell Labs was mostly a practitioner. The question that springs to mind is, why did Bell Labs decay while DARPA did not?
inglor_cz 2y ago
Altos Labs, which specializes on a very complicated topic (anti-aging, longevity), is fully privately funded, though. Even Bezos can look 20 years into the future and doesn't want to die.

colinng 2y ago

We don’t need to recreate Bell Labs. We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I. We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.) What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode. We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.

ayakang31415 2y ago

Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I always thought that private sector alone cannot make technological progress fast without the help of the government sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard because of their genuine interest in working on such projects because they either like the process of figuring things out or their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.

jackcosgrove 2y ago
Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income, job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a good match for the type of person who excels at basic research. Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of crowd. Public entities are best suited to providing this type of compensation and employment arrangement.
- navbaker 2y ago
  That sounds exactly like my employer, the JHU Applied Physics Lab. We’re a university affiliated research center, so we aren’t tied to the government pay scale and can provide a better career advancement outlook.
  - caddemon 2y ago
    Don't grants still tie you to government pay structures? I know in biology most academic research labs may as well be government entities because that's the main way to get funding, and that funding has various rules attached including e.g. the max pay for a postdoc.
    - navbaker 2y ago
      No, we don’t get funding through grants. Our work is either direct sponsored work or internal research funded through overhead. We aren’t a federally funded R&D center like Laurence Livermore or MIT Lincoln Labs, we are a university affiliated research center. We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get tenure, while also getting to push real products out to our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid off because we didn’t meet some growth number for the quarter.

unkoman 2y ago

From a non-tech perspective, IKEA, as a private company, shares a similar focus with Bell Labs on enhancing individual components to improve the overall system.

nox101 2y ago
What are some examples? What I've noticed buying Ikea stuff over the last 30 years so that it's gotten progressively lower-quality. Take for example their Kallax shelves. I've purchased them at least 4 times in the last 20 years, each time, a part that was metal before got replaced by a plastic or wood part, the wood got thinner or less dense, .... They still work so maybe that's innovative.

WalterBright 2y ago

Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by removing its core principles. Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.

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LarsDu88 2y ago
SpaceX doesn't really do any sort of frontier research. They do technology. They are taking concepts that have been done in the past and doing them more economically. They have pushed the state-of-the art with projects like Raptor-2, but doing fundamental research and simply doing engineering are different things.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  Skunk works also did technology
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The radar-invisible shapes came from a Soviet research paper!
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  The C programming language was a successor of other programming languages, too. Not a completely new entity, the first programming language of the world. Innovations that aren't on the frontier of knowledge, but have great potential for mass deployment, are precisely those that tend to have the biggest impact on humanity as such.

WalterBright 2y ago

I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about: 1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler? 2. would I need a license to call it C++? So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't notice. So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.

1992spacemovie 2y ago
Ironically wholesome lawyer story. That's a short list btw.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is him: https://www.forbisanddick.com/obituaries/William-Bill-Ryan-2/#!/Obituary https://www.forbisanddick.com/obituaries/William-Bill-Ryan-2...
  - NetOpWibby 2y ago
    Damn, RIP.
vinnyvichy 2y ago
Thanks for the story, it illustrates the lack of cynicism in all ranks, compared to Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today. I like reasons and conditions, but reproducing culture takes a lot more work. Though one feels the character and actions of Mervin Kelly were crucial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervin_Kelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervin_Kelly
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > Microsoft, Google or even OpenAI today. Probably an unrelated question, but why the "or even" caveat for OpenAI? They claimed to be an open non-profit, cynicism seems warranted at a level even moreso than Microsoft and Google.

GreedIsGood 2y ago

None of this addresses perhaps the main issue. Bell Labs predated the venture capital revolution of the 1970s. The key insight of venture capital was that firms like Bell Labs were holding on to very valuable resources at compensation rates that were far below what those resources could generate if they were empowered to create their own firms. This was tremendously successful. While we have no counterfactual, innovation in the US blosomed ove the last 50 years. The fundamental research may have languished (I would probably disagree, moore's law didn't happen through magic for example) a tremendous number of companies, and all of the large companies we know of today, which provide all of the services of the modern world were a result of venture capital.

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
I'm not sure that last part lands quite the way you meant it to.
coliveira 2y ago
Moore's law is dead in the USA for almost 20 years. The improvements we see come from research in Asia and the Netherlands. Also the idea that US tech companies are doing much innovation is debatable. They are designing products for the international markets, but the core technologies are more and more coming from Asia.
- shrubble 2y ago
  ASML is using basic research that was funded by the US government; that is why the US has the ability to veto/restrict who ASML sells the encumbered EUV and related other tech innovations, to.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    Yes, the research was initially done in the US. The current research and development is now done by the group in Netherlands. There is nothing in the US that comes close to what they have now.

WalterBright 2y ago

Thomas Edison invented the first commercial invention laboratory. The Wright Bros invented the first directed research and development program, where theories are developed and tested on a series of prototypes, leading towards the objective.

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ge96 2y ago

a ranch and infinite money

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kkfx 2y ago

What made Bell Labs so successful is simple: - public funds - researchers free to research instead of producing something marketable in 6 months or less - long term projects and goals as a NORMAL thing instead of being considered folly - a school system designed to make citizens not useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... Unfortunately the last point in the present time demand IN THEORY at least some new generations to be achieved, in practice the ruling class do not want at all anything like that so it's mere utopia. As a bottomline: EU was the most advanced countries of the world, when it do public funded research and industry, it commit suicide with WWI, the USA have copied and advance the EU model after WWII, then commit suicide as well with finaciarisation of anything, now it's China who rule, but the model, the substance is the same: countries grow and prosper with public funded research with long terms goals and researchers free to master themselves with the industry picking marketable research from them instead of commanding research. Countries might vary, populations might vary, implementations might vary a bit, but the principle so far have proved to be the same. As a result we are in a decline phase, which probably result in a series of LOST wars, and a long era of poverty and destruction before a new start.

jofer 2y ago

Big oil arguably had some of the closest up until the past ~10 years. I think folks may not realize how large Exxon and Shell's pure R&D labs are/were. The other majors have cut much more heavily on pure R&D in the past 20 years, but Exxon and Shell have always focused on pure research fairly heavily. It's been cut back in the past 10-ish years, but the R&D labs at both are still present. The breadth of it is significant, and while sure, it's geology, metallurgy, chemistry, etc (i.e. it's not what folks here likely think of as "tech"), it is fundamental research as opposed to applied research. A lot doesn't sure up under their R&D best because it's combined with internal consulting, but it's still a large group of folks hired to do r&d with diverse backgrounds. Those labs still exist today, but they're not as large as what they were in the recent past (e.g. 2010), and especially compared to their heyday in the 70's.

SiempreViernes 2y ago
Considering what those companies did with the most valuable research they ever produced, the climate predictions, they don't seem particularly worthy of emulation.

mcarmichael 2y ago

An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the number of qualified operators needed to scale out to a fully national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound business. The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well here: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q4/economic_history https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus... AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible (switching). For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might otherwise be confusing: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS'_PORTRAYAL_OF_SWITCHING_AS_COMPUTING_OR_NOT https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago

The gent in the photo was my postdoctoral advisor at Murray Hill. He's standing by the first CO2 laser which he invented and that was still in the lab I worked in when I was there.

riemannzeta 2y ago
Very cool. What did you use it for?
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  The laser was 30 years old at the time and kept in expectation that it would go to a museum, perhaps to the Smithsonian or equivalent. I didn't use it in my work. My advisor's retired technician would still come in once every couple of weeks because of his love for the Labs. Towards the end of my stay he and I put in fresh gas tanks and fired it up. All the 1960s vintage glass, power supplies, mechanical and optomechanical systems worked and it lased like a champ and made firebrick beam dumps glow. I don't know what became of it.
  - riemannzeta 2y ago
    It became a legend.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Timing + Infinite Money This was only possible during what was an unprecedented revolutionary time in scientific discovery which allowed for the possibility 1925 - 2000 was the most revolutionary time across all fields of science, probably ever. It's mind boggling the progress made in that period. We will likely not see a repeat until someone comes up with a quantum-classical unifying law and the resultant blowing open of all possibilities of engineering

gadflyinyoureye 2y ago

Another alien crash.

kredd 2y ago

People who are more familiar with Bell Labs — what was the compensation and life was like when one worked there? Were there any extremely alluring alternatives like FAANG of the day, where even a bottom line individual contributor can save a decent chunk of money after half a decade of work? It’s hard to convince extremely talented and motivated people to go into research nowadays when ad-tech and adjacent products pay so much more. Can’t even blame them, as it’s extremely high risk with very low reward. Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, but still.

fhd2 2y ago
I dunno about that. I'm regularly _flabbergasted_ by what hackers will do just for fun, and how they run circles around an industry veteran like me. Look at the modding scene for games (an extreme example being a 30 year old obscure German game called "Gothic" where the modding community is still building amazing stuff on top of this ancient piece of software). Look at 3D printing, or people dabbling with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. Look at the Emacs community and all the packages people build with a level of attention to detail you rarely find in commercial software. Those people are all doing it for fun. That's my dictionary definition of "extremely talented and motivated people". The world is big, and I figure those kinds of people would happily work in a place where they can put their talents to use full time for a livable wage. Provided they don't feel like they got the short end of the stick compared to their colleagues/managers, financially or otherwise, maybe. Probably not in the average tech company bureaucracy with all the overhead, micro management, politics and user-hostile antics though.

jhoechtl 2y ago

Technicians in the lead instead marketing men. Public money instead short fad hunting venture capital

fragmede 2y ago
OpenAI was founded in 2015. That's long time for venture capital to wait for possibly getting ChatGPT out there.

jschveibinz 2y ago

Bell Labs R&D budget in today's dollars would be about $1.5 billion. Google is closer to $10 billion, with DARPA around $3 billion and NASA at $10-15 billion. The total budget for all national labs is $12 billion. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-budgets-of-1970s.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...

revskill 2y ago

Lol, i think C++ is main reason of decline for Bell Labs due to crash.

Duanemclemore 2y ago

If you haven't you HAVE to read "The Idea Factory" by Gertner which was linked in the article. I think the conditions that led to Bell Labs contrast quite well with the "Shareholder Supremacy" episodes of Ed Zitron's "Better Offline" that just played. You can read pre-Welch GE (or 10x better Bell Labs) as the opposite of the aspects of business that Zitron rails against there.

ggm 2y ago

I'm not convinced you'd be able to replicate because it was a product of time and place. Mike Lesk, who worked at Bell (he implemented uucp, his motivation was purely to provide patch distribution according to what he told me) said one of the key experiences he took from Bell was how easy it is to occupy a vacuum and how hard it is to push aside established state. Unix exists. X11 exists. Kuberbetes exists. Gmail exists. Recreating a small team of highly accomplished experts with motivations which are not aimed at VC ipo, who are mutually trusting, and who have a beneficent employer with nation scale infrastructure they can burn to support you, and you still have the problem there's no vacuum, you're pushing aside other stuff. Giving birth to C and Unix in the ashes of BCPL and multics with the pdp11 as an architecture, that's a huge one time thing. Invent a time machine and it might not happen the same the second time round.

consp 2y ago

Bell Labs is not unique though. We had NatLab (Natuurkundig laboratorium, physics laboratory) at Philips. It's the birth place of the compact cassette and compact disk and did a lot of fundamental research. The main reason for its closure is usually cited as decentralized funding techniques icw economic downturn, though the betting in the wrong technique in the '90s sure didnt help (e.g. better flat crts instead of lcd).

max_ 2y ago

I wrote a review of a book which describes to me the best strategy for recreating Bell Labs like phenomena [0] [0]: https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-review/ https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-revie...

dredmorbius 2y ago

I've seen this question pop up periodically, usually addressed in the context of a single, usually historical, example. Bell Labs seems to most often get the nod as the canonical "Blue Sky" corporate R&D lab, though Xerox, DuPont, and IBM are others. DuPont specifically is the subject of a book by David A. Hounshell, Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902--1980. I'd suggest a broader consideration: - What are examples of extant or historical commercial R&D labs? - What large monopolistic companies haven't developed a significant R&D reputation, either for failure to establish a significant such operation, or a failure to develop awareness of their operation? - What business sectors generally have failed to establish a strong R&D tradition? I'm not going to go into a full answer for obvious reasons (a full response would be an interesting PhD thesis or course of study, not an HN comment), but we can outline some interesting aspects... The companies which did establish large R&D labs have tended to be in high-tech areas, largely information technology though also chemical and hardware fields (DuPont, arguably Xerox). Specifically I'm aware of: Bell Labs (AT&T), PARC (Xerox), IBM Research, Kodak Research Laboratories, DuPont Central Resource, RCA Labs, General Electric Research Lab, Westinghouse Research Labs. Notably absent from singificant US industrial history: Railroads, shipbuilding, Steelmaking (e.g., US Steel), oil (Standard Oil), electric power utilities generally, and the financial services industry. The aerospace sector stands out for having far less major corporate R&D research (or prominence) than one might otherwise expect. That's not to say that there are no such operations: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman all have R&D operations. A possibly explanation is that to a major extent Nasa and US military branches effectively provide R&D cover for the sector. My general sense is that there's less such activity in the sourcing sectors --- agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock --- than might be expected, though Bayer (including Monsanto), Syngenta, DuPont, BASF, Cargill, and John Deere do have some activity. Again government research is significant (e.g., USDA, Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), and significiant academic research (land grant universities in the US). Manufacturing, construction, and transportation generally seem to have a weak presence. To the extent that auto safety labs exist, many are strongly supported by the insurance sector. Device certification (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) are strongly similar. Both also see government consumer / product safety operations. Healthcare research tends to be organised around government units, academic research, and specifically-organised new-product (mostly pharmaceuticals, though also devices and processes) commercial operations, the latter often spin-offs of larger established pharmaceutical companies as a risk-isolation / diversification process. (Organisation of Novo Nordisk, recently notably for Ozempic, is its own fascinating story.) My general sense is that wholesale, retail, and financial services have little R&D in in the spirit of Bell Labs and similar Blue Skies research. There's quite a bit of tightly-focused product development, applied, and targeted research, but in scope, spirit, and freedom that's quite a different approach. There's some R&D in academic settings (retail/shopping behaviours, e.g.), or by government (the US Federal Reserve and the monetary system, adjunct to the financial sector). Teasing out some general trends, corporate Blue Sky research seems to be favoured by: - High tech fields, notably information technology, electronics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and to a lesser extent aerospace and energy research. - Less favourable sectors: traditional manufacturing, utilities, wholesale & retail trade, heavy industry, extractive industries, and transportation. - A strong and long-term stable corporate structure. Note that AT&T was initially founded in 1885, whilst Bell Labs wasn't established until 1925, 40 years later. DuPont preexisted its own labs by a century (founded in 1803 and 1903 respectively). RCA (1919) predated its labs (1942) by 23 years. Xerox (1906) predated PARC (1970) by 64 years. Labs don't spring up overnight, and even large and technical companies might not form labs if their tenure is short. - Monopolistic tendencies. Labs tend to form around monopolies, though this may be derivative of longevity. Not all monopolies form labs. - Payoffs to R&D. In Hounshell's book on DuPont, much is made of the comparative fecundity and sterility of early (1930s) and later (1960s, 1970s) research. Effectively, the viable product search space had much early low-hanging fruit, particularly in the 1930s (most plastics we know of today were discovered over roughly a decade), and the failure to find marketable products or enhancements by the 1960s (notably a synthetic "leather" product, "Corfam"). - Insufficient or ineffective government-lead or academic research. In numerous fields, the most significant R&D still occurs in government / academic settings. - Corporate mentality and mindset, possibly. There seem to be fields, including those with significant research potential in which R&D and sharing cultures simply don't exist to any great extent. I'd put finance and insurance in this group. "Why" remains a good question.

3298479328 2y ago

1. LSD hippie culture/aftermath 2. Pre-privatised/embryonic technology industry 3. A few geniuses The question implies time travel, better to look to the future

inglor_cz 2y ago

To a degree, SpaceX is modern equivalent of Bell Labs when it comes to space technology. They attracted a lot of frighteningly smart people and untied their hands. When thinking about Bell Labs etc., I often come to the conclusion that barriers matter more than anything else. If you force your engineers and scientists to hold long pointless conferences and produce some papers on regular schedule, plus submit their various work-related demands to an arbitrary set of rules and decision-makers, the result is similar to throwing sand into a mechanical machine. But these limitations usually exist because of money shortage / funding, and few people or organizations have enough money to just shower them on their eggheads, like Bell Labs once did.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

It would require dismantling, or at least scaling down, fintech, because that's where many smart people end up - the ones who would have been inventing Cool New Stuff if they hadn't been co-opted into working as quants. There have been at least two lost generations of fundamental research because of this.

betaporter 2y ago

A marginal tax rate that discourages profit hoarding. Any other answer is just wrong.

NickNaraghi 2y ago

For those who would like to read more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner[0] - one of my all time favorite books. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory

ricksunny 2y ago

I would like to ask Col.Karl Nell (ret.) who was working there during Bell Labs' trivestiture: (timestsmped): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cIcWWsH0c&t=75

vt85 2y ago

[dead]

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Probably a top ten mistake by the government to break up bell labs.

shockleyje 2y ago

I'm the last relative of William Shockley (cited in the story) who's still in the industry. I like the way this story portrays his success in solving open-ended problems as long as they aligned with the company direction. I've personally never made that connection between us, but it resonates with where I've personally found success, and currently am, in my career as well. Fortunately, a lot of our beliefs about the world are quite different.

sp_nster 2y ago

I'll leave this here. AT&T Labs is still doing interesting things. https://about.att.com/sites/labs https://about.att.com/sites/labs

commandlinefan 2y ago

Well, that's an easy question to answer: it would take more standup meetings, more status reports, more story point estimation, more mandatory spyware, more quarterly (or monthly!) goal setting, more planning poker, more sprint retros and way more non-technical middle management. That is, after all, the only path to Agility. If it's not working, you're not doing it hard enough.

mewse 2y ago
It's kind of impressive how rapidly and how many rote processes built up around what began as "[We value] individuals and interactions over processes and tools"

kidfkj 2y ago

[flagged]

porsche4664 2y ago

[flagged]