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It depresses me to see BBN Technologies referred to as Raytheon. Although they were acquired, it's as if Bell Labs were referred to as Lucent or Alcatel.

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The current Bell Labs is a spin off of only the US Government contracts that were in place when the Lucent-Alcatel merger occurred. This was done because Alcatel is a foreign owned company and cannot be a part of sensitive government contract. All of the other research was kept with Lucent-Alcatel. So what's now known as Bell Labs is really just a name.

Lucent-Alcatel disbanded all research in 2008.

I hadn't heard of the spinoff; thanks. I worked at both Lucent Bell Labs (pre-Alcatel) and BBN (pre-Raytheon). I definitely keep track of BBN, it's an amazing company and I hope it continues to have it's own identity under Raytheon. Lucent Bell Labs was already dying when I was there back in 2003–but even then had some great active projects and Unix gods still around. So yea, perhaps the real "Bell Labs" is now AT&T Labs or perhaps Bell Labs is really dead.

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