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Don't get the impression that they were batting 1000 either. Bell Labs spent an inordinate amount of time writing and debugging a driver for a dodgy printer.
by jandrese 2y ago
Don't get the impression that they were batting 1000 either. Bell Labs spent an inordinate amount of time writing and debugging a driver for a dodgy printer. Several of the projects never went anywhere. How many of you have used pico to edit an image lately?
- virtue3 2y agoI think there’s a huge argument here for what their research inspired others to do as well. Just the small work they did on supporting mice so early on (third system to integrate a mouse?) was pretty massive for changing the way we interact and deal with computers. I know the mouse concept is in “the mother of all demos” but actually first principle integration of the mouse into the system probably belongs to PARC.
- cma 2y agoTrackball predates the mouse though and things wouldn't have been very different if we only had them.
- almostnormal 2y agoLight pens are old, too, and with touch screens we are going back to that, without the light of the pen needed.
- Isamu 2y ago>a driver for a dodgy printer You mean the Mergenthaler Linotron 202? That cost nearly $60,000 but they considered it the lowest price high-resolution phototypesetter available in 1978?
- jandrese 2y agoYeah, and it was still a huge pile of crap that required constant TLC just to not break. Printers never change.
- inglor_cz 2y agoIf their employees got 9 Nobel Prizes among them, surely we can wave away some fails that happened along the way.