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Missing context here is that Bell labs was at its most productive when it was a government backed monopoly, with the govt insisting that it work in the general public benefit. It’s not possible now because that sort of public-private symbiosis has totally fallen out of favour and regulators just don’t really have the teeth to grab the bull by the horns like that anymore.
Or to put that another way, it would take putting the teeth back in regulation (among other things).
Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn’t unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.
Google had this vibe too, prior to going public.
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)
I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).
It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.
Just use what Bell had before: a monopoly on virtually all communication to pay for crazy ideas and irregular output. Also, stomp out all competition so no one else can make any discoveries of their own. Can’t have rivals muddying the history of who invented what.
What that monopoly got us: The C programming language, UNIX, UTF-8, among others
What the current tech monopolies yielded: yachts for the upper management
Hey now, there’s also been a lot of enshitification with the new system.
And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.
If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.
the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.
That’s incredibly incorrect.
Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:
- Movies with synchronous sound
- Text-to-speech
- Stereo broadcasts
- Radio astronomy
- The transistor
- Unix
- The C programming language
- The calculator
- Solar electricity
- Transatlantic telephone cables
- LASER
- Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)
Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don’t have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.
I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.
I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.
I agree with almost all of it. Surely your grandmother or eldest living non-troglodyte relative has benefitted from transistors and calculators. Even lasers. Probably even Unix, if they use a Mac, as most tech-illiterate do.
However, the silver lining here is that this monopoly actually invested… heavily…into R&D. You don’t see that now, not to the levels that they did.
The importance of basic research…
A breakthrough in physics that enables a new technology to have all the benefits and zero downsides of our current globally deployed communication standards. Like true wireless energy, or something that can replace undersea cables.
Well Google was basically that - it revolutionized search, which made the Internet accessible for casual users
And it worked - Google put more into R&D moon shots than anyone… Except the economic META has changed, and everything innovative just ended up in the Google graveyard before it had a chance to mature
Bell Labs worked because they threw excess piles of money at the best people they could find, and they gave them autonomy. They gave them time, and let them build things with no clear application for their company
Today, that money goes into stock buybacks, executive bonuses, and buying out promising startups. Stock prices this quarter are all that matters, and R&D only raises stock prices when it promises insane growth or quick monetization
And, at least from what I recall, the incentive for bell to toss that excess money into research, is the corporate tax rates were so high it would’ve been taken from them if not spent anyway.
Well a SWE at Google just won a Nobel in chemistry?
