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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing this article; this changed some of my perceptions of Bell Labs regarding how free its researchers were, though Bell Labs was certainly one of the most free industrial research labs in history, alongside 1970s-era Xerox PARC.

The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems.

Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.

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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. Several of the projects never went anywhere. How many of you have used pico to edit an image lately?

I 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.

Trackball predates the mouse though and things wouldn't have been very different if we only had them.

Light pens are old, too, and with touch screens we are going back to that, without the light of the pen needed.

>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?

Yeah, and it was still a huge pile of crap that required constant TLC just to not break. Printers never change.

If their employees got 9 Nobel Prizes among them, surely we can wave away some fails that happened along the way.

I agree with your post, but thought I’d point out that the problems those labs worked on weren’t transistors, Unix, etc. Those were the solutions.

Question: In light of the article, is it fair to lump Bell Labs in with Xerox PARC like that? Bell invented a lot of stuff which directly improved the telephone system and communications in general. Possibly because they owned every problem from end-to-end. PARC invented some really great space-cadet stuff, which was semi-related to document production, but Xerox had no idea how to sell it, because it wasn't 'make copies'.

Xerox made more off PARC's laser printer patent than the entire PARC budget. Plus they invented the modern desktop UI, and ethernet.

Oy, you're right about the laser printer (as that is how modern copy machines work).

But GUIs, OOP programming, etc, Xerox had no business model around that at all and it was just sitting around, until someone "stole the loot".

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