7 ms·

The Ghost of Invention: A Visit to Bell Labs

78 points by DocFeind 12y ago

bhousel 12y ago
Interesting article. I live down the street from the Acatel-Lucent Murray Hill campus, and have explored it occasionally while running. The campus is bizarrely sad, like the article describes, a place where its best years seem behind it. They have one of those trail/fitness courses that snakes around the back, and it's in terrible disrepair. And a basketball court with broken nets and weeds growing through it. But they installed a brand new shuffleboard court! I guess the demographics of the place have changed...
- biscuitt 12y ago
  I've live right down the road from it as well. It was always fun driving by and seeing a bunch of people playing cricket on the front lawn
casca 12y ago
Douglas Coupland gave a great talk about the book at the RSA on Tuesday - http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/Inside-Alcatel-Lucent-with-Douglas-Coupland http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/Insi...
hypertexthero 12y ago
I highly recommend _Another Great Day at Sea, Life Aboard The USS George H.W. Bush_ by Geoff Dyer with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins, from the same 'Writers in Residence' series as Kitten Clone. Here's a sample from chapter 22: > One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my door seconds after I'd done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had summoned him — a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up there right away.
gshubert17 12y ago
A sad thing happened to me recently. I had looked up some data files that accompanied Kernighan's "Practice of Programming" book from a server at Bell Labs [0], and had downloaded a couple of the files from chapter 3, but today I get an "Unable to load page" error message. [0] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/
- kps 12y ago
  Yes, I just noticed a couple days ago that http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ is gone (and blocked from archive.org).
MaDeuce 12y ago
Anyone with an interest in the Holmdel facility will likely enjoy this photo album of the now-empty site. http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs It was an impressive building at the time. Having worked there for years, it is rather unsettling to see it featured as an abandoned urban site.
- odonnellryan 12y ago
  I wonder how hard it is to get in? I live in New Jersey. Would be interesting.
- FD3SA 12y ago
  After going through those photos, I was overcome with an immense sadness. Such a perfect portrait of the decline of institutional science.
  - angersock 12y ago
    You mean, like how Google, Microsoft, General Mills, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and others aren't doing basic research?
    - ghaff 12y ago
      There is an argument to be made that industrial R&D these days is more about the D and less about the R than it once was but Bell Labs was always sui generis--and a creature of AT&T's telephone monopoly (which was hardly an unalloyed good). But the world is also a lot different than in Bell Labs' heyday. I'd be genuinely curious to hear about what areas or types of important research that would once have been done aren't being done today in the absence of a true Bell Labs equivalent.
- andyjohnson0 12y ago
  Previous discussion of a different article about the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069081
- 12y ago
advocaat23 12y ago
What a crappy design. If I scroll down and there is an image, I have to scroll further (without visual indication) and then the text will float over. I have seen this design now on multiple pages, how is this called? IMHO it is a terrible user experience. //edit: No, really, what's the idea? It really messes up the scrolling experience.
- slouch 12y ago
  I think this is a style inspired by The New York Times' "Snow Fall," but this instance is not as good. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Its not made to be usable, but to LOOK GOOD at first glance on the ipad. web 3.something baby :/
tsunamifury 12y ago
This is a very good article -- and it is about much more than Bell Labs. In the later sections the author attacks singularity problems, humanities place as it continues to virtualize more and more of itself, and frames Bell Labs as the remnants of reality left over (and maybe we still inhabit) after we move our minds further and further from our physical presence.
angersock 12y ago
My first internship was at a company that was (apparently) a pretty big deal in the 80s, and by the time I'd gotten there was relegated to a quarter corner of a small floor in a building. The passion had long since left, the three remaining programmers were just ticking off days, and a sort of miasma of sadness and despair hung in the air. There was a brief hope when we showed up to work on a goofy R&D project, and within a few weeks you could tell the office was happier to have my co-intern and I around, if for no other reason than we were fresh, youthful faces. I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation. In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things. By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear. This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.
kjs3 12y ago
What the actual fuck is up with that intro paragraph? Robot housewives? Not a bad article after that, but crap on a cracker that was painful to read.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  It's Douglas Coupland. He's normally a fiction writer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland
scott_s 12y ago
I find it disconcerting when one of the repeated themes of a piece is the author's own ignorance and inability to understand the people he is talking to.
rasz_pl 12y ago
Wow this is one depressing article. Not only the place is in the past, people working in it also appear to be stuck in 1995. > in 1995, “Nobody in Bell Labs used the Internet :(( I did. >umbrella with a GSM modem that glows blue when it knows you’ll be needing it its called an app, on your phone >Medicine bottles that record the number of times they’ve been opened already patented several times over and on the market for years http://www.epill.com/timecap.html http://www.epill.com/timecap.html I was expecting place like that to be working on big stuff. Quantum teleportation, beam forming, not fart apps and magic umbrellas :(
segmondy 12y ago
I wonder when this will happen to google and facebook. Happend to Xerox Labs, then Bell Labs/lucent. It's hard to imagine google and facebook being ghosts from the past, but everything must end at some point right?
- a3n 12y ago
  And Microsoft. When a company gets big enough, the people who operate the machine that is the company become more prominent than the people that do what the company is supposedly in existence for. Because when a company gets that big, the sole reason it exists is to make money, and what it does to make money is incidental. In that sense, Google is exactly the same as Kroger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger Every large billion dollar company is doomed to be a large billion dollar company.
thomasjudge 12y ago
Prose like this feels to me like the outcome of a peculiar disease which seems to affect particularly tech-oriented writers who have achieved a certain level of notoriety; the task of communicating ideas becomes subordinate to the florid expression of the author's own wonderfulness.
- potbelly83 12y ago
  Agreed. I like this particular gem: "...except in this case, the intelligence factor has escalated logarithmically".
- Scuds 12y ago
  ... said about a Douglas Coupland article in Wired ...
- delluminatus 12y ago
  While I have no idea how you've drawn a link between florid prose and tech authors -- try reading articles in major media outlets about any topic and you will probably see a similar style -- the writing in this article is cringeworthy, and smacks of intellectual laziness.
- myself248 12y ago
  Or quizzically anti-intellectual bent. Le sigh. If the author had spent as much time actually telling us what these people do and what's interesting about it, as he spent flopping on the floor weeping "I'm not worthy!" about their intelligence, it might've been an interesting read. Sadly, it wasn't.
LeoPanthera 12y ago
Is this page completely broken for anyone else? (Safari 7.1 on OS X, no extensions) http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg
- MaysonL 12y ago
  Yeah, seems broken for me too, Safari 8 on Yosemite.

78 points by DocFeind 12y ago

Interesting article. I live down the street from the Acatel-Lucent Murray Hill campus, and have explored it occasionally while running. The campus is bizarrely sad, like the article describes, a place where its best years seem behind it. They have one of those trail/fitness courses that snakes around the back, and it's in terrible disrepair. And a basketball court with broken nets and weeds growing through it. But they installed a brand new shuffleboard court! I guess the demographics of the place have changed...

biscuitt 12y ago
I've live right down the road from it as well. It was always fun driving by and seeing a bunch of people playing cricket on the front lawn

casca 12y ago

Douglas Coupland gave a great talk about the book at the RSA on Tuesday - http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/Inside-Alcatel-Lucent-with-Douglas-Coupland http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2014/Insi...

hypertexthero 12y ago

I highly recommend _Another Great Day at Sea, Life Aboard The USS George H.W. Bush_ by Geoff Dyer with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins, from the same 'Writers in Residence' series as Kitten Clone. Here's a sample from chapter 22: > One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my door seconds after I'd done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had summoned him — a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up there right away.

gshubert17 12y ago

A sad thing happened to me recently. I had looked up some data files that accompanied Kernighan's "Practice of Programming" book from a server at Bell Labs [0], and had downloaded a couple of the files from chapter 3, but today I get an "Unable to load page" error message. [0] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/

kps 12y ago
Yes, I just noticed a couple days ago that http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ is gone (and blocked from archive.org).

MaDeuce 12y ago

Anyone with an interest in the Holmdel facility will likely enjoy this photo album of the now-empty site. http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs http://www.newenglandruins.com/bell-labs It was an impressive building at the time. Having worked there for years, it is rather unsettling to see it featured as an abandoned urban site.

odonnellryan 12y ago
I wonder how hard it is to get in? I live in New Jersey. Would be interesting.
FD3SA 12y ago
After going through those photos, I was overcome with an immense sadness. Such a perfect portrait of the decline of institutional science.
- angersock 12y ago
  You mean, like how Google, Microsoft, General Mills, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and others aren't doing basic research?
  - ghaff 12y ago
    There is an argument to be made that industrial R&D these days is more about the D and less about the R than it once was but Bell Labs was always sui generis--and a creature of AT&T's telephone monopoly (which was hardly an unalloyed good). But the world is also a lot different than in Bell Labs' heyday. I'd be genuinely curious to hear about what areas or types of important research that would once have been done aren't being done today in the absence of a true Bell Labs equivalent.
andyjohnson0 12y ago
Previous discussion of a different article about the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069081
12y ago

advocaat23 12y ago

What a crappy design. If I scroll down and there is an image, I have to scroll further (without visual indication) and then the text will float over. I have seen this design now on multiple pages, how is this called? IMHO it is a terrible user experience. //edit: No, really, what's the idea? It really messes up the scrolling experience.

slouch 12y ago
I think this is a style inspired by The New York Times' "Snow Fall," but this instance is not as good. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
rasz_pl 12y ago
Its not made to be usable, but to LOOK GOOD at first glance on the ipad. web 3.something baby :/

tsunamifury 12y ago

This is a very good article -- and it is about much more than Bell Labs. In the later sections the author attacks singularity problems, humanities place as it continues to virtualize more and more of itself, and frames Bell Labs as the remnants of reality left over (and maybe we still inhabit) after we move our minds further and further from our physical presence.

angersock 12y ago

My first internship was at a company that was (apparently) a pretty big deal in the 80s, and by the time I'd gotten there was relegated to a quarter corner of a small floor in a building. The passion had long since left, the three remaining programmers were just ticking off days, and a sort of miasma of sadness and despair hung in the air. There was a brief hope when we showed up to work on a goofy R&D project, and within a few weeks you could tell the office was happier to have my co-intern and I around, if for no other reason than we were fresh, youthful faces. I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation. In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things. By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear. This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.

kjs3 12y ago

What the actual fuck is up with that intro paragraph? Robot housewives? Not a bad article after that, but crap on a cracker that was painful to read.

joezydeco 12y ago
It's Douglas Coupland. He's normally a fiction writer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland

scott_s 12y ago

I find it disconcerting when one of the repeated themes of a piece is the author's own ignorance and inability to understand the people he is talking to.

rasz_pl 12y ago

Wow this is one depressing article. Not only the place is in the past, people working in it also appear to be stuck in 1995. > in 1995, “Nobody in Bell Labs used the Internet :(( I did. >umbrella with a GSM modem that glows blue when it knows you’ll be needing it its called an app, on your phone >Medicine bottles that record the number of times they’ve been opened already patented several times over and on the market for years http://www.epill.com/timecap.html http://www.epill.com/timecap.html I was expecting place like that to be working on big stuff. Quantum teleportation, beam forming, not fart apps and magic umbrellas :(

segmondy 12y ago

I wonder when this will happen to google and facebook. Happend to Xerox Labs, then Bell Labs/lucent. It's hard to imagine google and facebook being ghosts from the past, but everything must end at some point right?

a3n 12y ago
And Microsoft. When a company gets big enough, the people who operate the machine that is the company become more prominent than the people that do what the company is supposedly in existence for. Because when a company gets that big, the sole reason it exists is to make money, and what it does to make money is incidental. In that sense, Google is exactly the same as Kroger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger Every large billion dollar company is doomed to be a large billion dollar company.

thomasjudge 12y ago

Prose like this feels to me like the outcome of a peculiar disease which seems to affect particularly tech-oriented writers who have achieved a certain level of notoriety; the task of communicating ideas becomes subordinate to the florid expression of the author's own wonderfulness.

potbelly83 12y ago
Agreed. I like this particular gem: "...except in this case, the intelligence factor has escalated logarithmically".
Scuds 12y ago
... said about a Douglas Coupland article in Wired ...
delluminatus 12y ago
While I have no idea how you've drawn a link between florid prose and tech authors -- try reading articles in major media outlets about any topic and you will probably see a similar style -- the writing in this article is cringeworthy, and smacks of intellectual laziness.
myself248 12y ago
Or quizzically anti-intellectual bent. Le sigh. If the author had spent as much time actually telling us what these people do and what's interesting about it, as he spent flopping on the floor weeping "I'm not worthy!" about their intelligence, it might've been an interesting read. Sadly, it wasn't.

LeoPanthera 12y ago

Is this page completely broken for anyone else? (Safari 7.1 on OS X, no extensions) http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pY0dH4N.jpg

MaysonL 12y ago
Yeah, seems broken for me too, Safari 8 on Yosemite.