The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)

I was looking at that building interior and the (faux) leather seats built into the concrete that surrounds the sunken waiting area, and it got me thinking about perception and how much of our reality is a sort of mind game we engage in.

Back in the day, that space must have felt like a sort of corporate power display with edgy futuristic vibes. The secretaries sat in the middle area and (mostly) men in dark suits and skinny ties were on those seats with standard issue briefcases. Not a t-shirt in sight. This is the sort of imaginal corporate space that was satirized by Tati in his films in late 60s. By 70s, this space was getting dusty and the men are now wearing polyester suits with fat ties. Various shades of brown. Not sure about the vibes or the secretaries. Today it looks like some sort of nafarious institution.

Through it all it remained the same physical reality. I think this is the ultimate essence and meaning of architectural objects: they are ultimately materialized words in the widest sense, in that their reality is substantially created in the mind and merely girded by the physicality of the object.

I remember going to Holmdel to install our network backup product (which later became something named ABARS in AT&T if I remember well), in the 80s. For this young French Unix geek, this was like walking into the Olympe, among the gods :) Edit: Souvenirs, souvenirs. I remember how impressive the atrium was, nothing like it in France at the time (or now probably). However I was working in a basement room, which was incidentally full of Cisco routers. If I had seized the hint and bought a bit of stock, I'd be a richer man... Our software had a memory usage issue on the big Bell Labs file systems, and the very nice AT&T manager insisted that I would not be allowed to go back to France until I fixed the issue. This was a trivial linear reallocation problem, but there was obviously no Stack Overflow at the time so I had to invent exponential reallocation on the spot to get home. I still have the UUCP email paths to our correspondents in my mail archive.

My late family member was a technical editor at Bell Labs, and I inherited a few of his papers, and his internal resume is truly boring in many places:

“From October 1970 through December 1970, served as a member of the Western Electric Committee on the Technical Data Design Classification Plan.”

“Worked on studies and publication specifications for an automated Maintenance Data System (MDS).”

He did work on some slightly more interesting things, like documentation for a cable-laying ship, and he was proud of helping with the monumental book project “A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System”. But overall it was just a job for him, for several decades; he retired as soon as he could.

Nice article, bad title. I worked at Holmdel and other locations for 10 years in development, not research, and it was very far from boring.

I worked for a while as a contract tech writer at Lucent (the spun-off version of Bell Labs after the AT&T split) in the 90s. It was an interesting company to work for, although the biggest memories I have are of the hardbound notebooks they had which had page numbers (something I didn’t see again until I came across Leuchtturm notebooks decades later), winning the contest for longest commute during bike-to-work week (I biked from my apartment on the Near North Side of Chicago to suburban Lisle, a distance of about 30 miles), a discussion about whether bananas were technically fruits (I remember people coming to the incorrect decision they weren’t, not realizing that the black spots in the middle of the banana are seeds) and a trainer who gave the writers a course on cell phone technology going into great detail about his ham radio hobby. It was a great company to work at, but the commute was pretty awful and I ended up moving on after a year there.

Uncool or not, working at a place with a confluence of technical problems to solve, sounds wonderful.

It’s a cool building. I got the privilege of being part of a hackathon that was run out of the building after it was no longer in use. I had a startup making a laser tag style game of assassin with cell phones, and I got to stay up all night with a bunch of college kids playing assassin in the building. Got to wander around to off limits areas and read white board graffiti from the last departing employees. It’s a the kind of office space I’ve only dreamed about working in.

Design of Experiments? Boring? I'm glad she's showing her passion – I've reviewed applications for people with just "data science" experience, versus people with additional research design experience, and their "traditional" training ended contributing so much more to our resource-constrained environment with small customer samples.

At one point, when I worked in an area with many pilot fabs, Intel was haemorraging technicians with practical experience working with statistical quality control, but didn't necessarily have a lot of formal education on their CVs. Their loss...

The access roads for Holmdel are interesting - two ovals running in opposite directions with U-turns at intervals.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Holmdel,+NJ/@40.3670801,-7...

I went to Stanford for my Masters in CS in the late 80's. I encountered several folks who were there on a fellowship from Bell Labs. None of them had any intention on returning the New Jersey after they completed their degrees. I can only imagine that the program didn't last long after that.

I went to Holmdel High and my girlfriend's dad was an engineer at the Bell Labs Holmdel location. As it turns out he invented a little something called Adaptive Delta Modulation (aka Abate Delta Modulation) for his Doctorate Thesis in 1968.

They definitely had brain power at the Holmdel location too.

I worked at the Holmdel Lucent building in the late 90s. It was huge and for me the library in the atrium on the ground floor was the best. Browsed so many books on varied subjects there during breaks.

The other highlight was the cafeteria ;-)

Good memories.

Great story. It seems such a luxury to have a decent well-paying job with real stability, 9-to-5 work hours, and enough interesting projects to sink your teeth in.

Is this something you only find in corporate or academic labs?

So that's where the Control game art direction got inspired :).

I love the lore, thanks!

Good article! Looks like a great blog too. Subscribed to the RSS feed. Thanks for referencing.

Nostalgic alumni here :)