#belllabs

[azspot]

What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?

For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the conditions that made Bell Labs so successful were highly historically contingent and not the sort of thing that could be deliberately recreated. Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs. Prior discoveries in quantum mechanics provided a wealth of new phenomena that Bell Labs could harvest for new technology, and WWII both pushed technology forward across the board and turned Bell Labs into an organization poised to capitalize on it. In the end, Bell Labs was ultimately undermined by the very technologies that it had created. The world that Bell Labs thrived in no longer exists: to push technological progress forward, we'll need to understand both why Bell Labs worked and why it no longer could.

[procedural-generation]

Lillian Schwartz

I came across this article about Lilian Schwartz recently, which gives me a great springboard to talk about how the history of these things goes back a lot further than we sometimes assume. She was making films out of computer-generated imagery in 1976., and before that was making machine art.

Some of her projects would fit right in with a gallery of Processing projects, except she did it with machine language and FORTRAN.

There have been a lot of people experimenting with this stuff: Schwartz wasn’t the first. Some of them influenced other people who in turn influenced the works we see today, but the early history of art and computers is not very well known. Fortunately, there are people actively researching it--and some of the original artists are still around.

[galeriepact]

#SarahMeyohas incredible movie on view at the gallery. #belllabs #josefalbers @sarahmeyohas (à Pact)

[unixbhaskar]

Early days of Unix and design of sh by Stephen R. Bourne

Ah, fascinating! Stephen R. Bourne ....inventor of Bourne Shell

#UNIX #shell #bellllabs  

[azspot]

Though it had many successes in the first 25 years of its life, the crowning achievement of Bell Labs research (and its strategy of leveraging early-stage scientific research to create new products) is undoubtedly its development of the transistor, along with its various derivatives (the MOSFET, the solar PV cell) and associated manufacturing technologies (including crystal pulling, zone melting, and diffusion furnaces). The transistor is a classic case of Bell Labs’ strategy: wide research freedom, circumscribed by the requirement to produce things useful for the Bell System. The telephone network required enormous amounts of vacuum tubes and mechanical relays to act as switches, but these were far from ideal components. Vacuum tubes were delicate, power-hungry, and fragile, and mechanical relays were slow and prone to wearing out. Mervin Kelly, physicist and head of the Bell Labs vacuum tube department in the early 1930s (and later the president of Bell Labs), dreamed of replacing them with solid-state components with no moving parts. Advances in quantum mechanics, and novel materials known as semiconductors, suggested that such components might be possible.

Brian Potter

[incredefy]

The idea of having a cellular network on the moon may seem like a far-fetched sci-fi concept, but it's becoming a reality thanks to Nokia's

[vimeoshorts]

Future Impossible - The Story of Light

It takes a visionary to foresee that a sunbeam could carry sound. It takes incredible minds and pioneering foresight to make real, the unimaginable.

Journey around the globe through time and space to hear from the scientists who transform theories into technologies, the people that harnessed light to shape our modern world and those who are reforming it for an imagined future.

[jasonparis]

Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. My second Eero Saarinen building this trip and another that could never disappoint. While it looks fairly large from the outside, the inside is by all definitions monstrous. • • • #igersnj #newjersey #tristatearea #murrayhillnj #belllabs #modernism #architecture #lucent #nokia #atandt #architecture #eerosaarinen https://www.instagram.com/p/B1tv2sMA-6C/?igshid=mlxfwvb0v9u5