fabulous book

I can second the recommendation for "The Idea Factory" ISBN 978-1-59420-328-2.

It was a great read. Of course, I was reminded of the time I spent working at EMI Central Research in London, which was the British equivalent. Like Bell Labs, modern capitalism couldn't see the point of it either, and eventually dismantled it.

We'll never know how much those bad choices have cost us. Rational governments would have stepped in and kept them going as idea factories, but neither the US nor the UK had one of them when it might have done us some good.

We're awash in bits. The protected lagoon isn't needed any longer.

Claude Shannon, the guy who gave them the tool to use when physics got stuck after Einstein.

The book "The Village Effect" by Susan Pinker

makes the point that regular face-to-face contact is whole lot more effecti ve than this kind of interaction. The "protected lagoon" may not be as nece ssary as it was, but it's a whole lot more productive than the collection o f smaller ponds that we've got now.

Having been at IBM Watson in the latter part of its glory days, I can tell you that the whole was definitely more than the sum of its parts. (About the time I joined, IBM Research folks won two physics Nobels in a row.) Though there was a lot of overlap, Zurich was more of a pure research place, and Watson was more applied, especially in semiconductors and computer hardware. I started in the Manufacturing Research organization, which was a gizmo builder's paradise--IBM was the primary company making advanced ECL, which had a whole different set of manufacturing challenges from CMOS, and so we had an apparently endless supply of intriguing and economically important measurement challenges. We made about 25% of the world's semiconductors at that point (1987), so there was a lot of leverage.

I shared an office wall with Bob Dennard, the inventor of dynamic memory; my next door lab neighbour was Ed Yarmchuk, who invented self-servowriting for hard disks; and I consulted with folks like Dick Garwin (designer of the first hydrogen bomb among many many other things), Rolf Landauer (the solid state guy's solid state guy), and Peter Sorokin (inventor of the dye laser and many other things).

The cool thing was that, just by wandering down the hall, I could find a world's expert on just about anything I needed to know about, from copper plating to cache coherence to diode lasers and lithography lenses.

That was part of what made it possible for me to change fields every five years or so, which was a blast, and I miss it. I don't miss the post-1992 IBM so much, and especially not the post-2005 IBM. I do miss having colleagues, but that may be getting better soon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

QED

Ironically, it was the giant monolopies - Bell and IBM - that could afford the great labs. The government broke both up, and the little bits and pieces, now competitors, couldn't and wouldn't fund the labs.

Gonna start hiring?

Who does that remind us of? Some former community organizer?

Is it big monopolies, or just the times? GE/ Ford/ RCA (I'm sure there were others) use to have good research labs. Maybe not quite on the level of Bell labs...

George H.

I don't recall that IBM was ever a monopoly, and it was their ham-handed at tempts to act like one that opened up their market to their competitors.

EMI certainly wasn't a monopoly, and wasn't broken up by any government - B ritish management did the job all on it's own. Jimmy Carter's short term fr eeze on US hospitals buying body scanners may have been the straw that brok e the camel's back, but EMI's management should have been a bit more risk-a verse.

You don't have to hire people to have colleagues - it is one way of getting them, but not the only one.

Many old companies - HP, Tek, IBM, AT&T - had a genuine management commitment to public service and the public good. Now, mostly, management is committed to quarterly profits, stock prices, and exporting jobs. I (surprise!) blame a lot of that on government policy.

Right.

My tiny company doesn't fund a research lab, but we occasionally spend time and money on learning obscure stuff, researching a technology or a science or a market. Even the apparent failures tend to pay off in the long term. Of course, big public companies don't have much of a "long term."

Before 1984, Bell Labs was a cost-plus organization--Bell could charge its customers $1.10 or something for every dollar they put into the lab.

It was really the combination of the dotcom bust and the Jan Hendrik Schon fraud that finally killed off Lucent's Bell Labs.

IBM's consent decree was imposed in 1956 and lifted in 1996, which was near the beginning of the decline. IBM gradually got out of the hardware business, and after 2000ish the senior research managers weren't people who were famous for doing something real, as they had been previously (Paul Horn was the primary guy who figured out 1/f noise, for instance). They started being ruled by HR and the legal department. (They may be recovering somewhat, actually.) It really was a tragedy.

No, I'm considering getting into lidar (laser radar) for vehicles and other applications. I did a design study early this year, which led to a bunch of possible avenues, and I have some angel funding nibbles, but need some credible and congenial management (which is not me). We'll see if it comes together. Might be a lot of fun.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There is also a market for an easy to use LIDAR calibrator. Speeders get off when a good lawyer questions the speed gun calibration. Cops could poke their gun into a box in the coffee room, and have its calibration recorded, maybe every morning.

I did license my timestamp technology to a speed-lidar company, but they decided to do something public-domain, klunky and free.

Do not forget DuPont.

Dan

In The Idea Factory it was noted that most of the great thinkers at Bell tended to have breakfast or lunch with Harry Nyquist.

In The Information, I was surprised to find that Turing spent time at Bell and often had tea with Shannon. They were working on different crypto projects, and couldn't talk about their work, so they talked about other stuff.

Was it Shannon who decreed that information is conserved (and brought about The Great Black Hole Firewall flap)?

Mark L. Fergerson

(snip)

They should have read more science-fiction. George O. Smith's 1942 _QRM - Interplanetary_ is a cautionary tale about exactly that, PHB and everything.

Mark L. Fergerson

(snip)

I blame the breakup of Ma Bell on Lily Tomlin.

I hope she is enjoying her three-page phone bills as much as I enjoy mine.

Mark L. Fergerson

That was the guy who cleared all the Martian sawgrass out, leaving V. Eq. With no air supply, iirc.

In this case, Channing and Franks had just lost the company $8B in 1992, so it wasn't quite the same thing. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs