The roots and history of what is now the Computing Science Research Center, locally called Center 1127, go well back into the past. It seems to be one of the most stable organizations in Bell Labs; even the numerical name has remained moderately constant. Management and population, of course, have been coming and going over the years, and likewise our dominant and peripheral research interests have varied, but overall have have retained a consistency of theme.
A variety of places, including Lucent's history site have information about the company's work in CS-related areas. Probably the most comprehensive is in the multi-volume A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System, especially the volume subtitled Communications Sciences (1984; ISBN 0-932764-08-1). The most relevant section of this book was prepared by B. D. (Bernie) Holbrook and W. S. (Stan) Brown, and it was also made available as CSTR #99. Brown and Holbrook were 127 department heads in the 1960s and 1970s.
The general histories of the contributions of Bell Labs to the beginning and the flowering of the company's CS research appropriately do not discuss organizational structure, but it is interesting for our own long-lived organization to peek into this. In these notes I use the term "director" for the person who led the center and ignore the title-inflation of recent years.
Center 127, as a specifically CS organization (and as it was originally numbered), began as a split-off, in 1960, from a more general Mathematics Research organization (12) within Bell labs as the increasing importance of computers became evident to the company. Our numerical names were a digit shorter then: Research was just Area 1!
It appears that John R. Pierce was originally named to head the new center, but this appointment was reversed very rapidly, and the first actual director was Henry Pollak during 1960-1962; he also headed the existing Math center. Pollak was succeeded in turn by Edward E. David, whose background was in acoustics. In about 1964 David was promoted to Executive Director in Division 13, 127's numerical name was changed to 137, and Thomas H. Crowley became our director. He stayed until 1967, when he moved to Whippany to work on the anti-missile project. At this point Samuel P. Morgan became director. A bit later (by 1972) the name was changed back to 127.
Morgan remained as director until 1982, when he stepped down in favor of A. G. (Sandy) Fraser. Sam thus can claim the title of longest-serving director, as well as presiding over an especially productive period. His productive research career continued for many years after leaving management.
Fraser stayed as director for several years (until about 1988) when he was promoted, and then left to head up the AT&T Research lab in the 1995 Trivestiture. Fraser's replacement was Al Aho. Aho remained in the position for a couple of years, then left to work at Bellcore, though he confessed at the time that his ultimate destination was academia; this seems to have been achieved, though a route more convoluted than he had planned.
After Aho left, a "gang of 5" Department Heads collectively managed the center for some months until Ravi Sethi emerged as the obvious choice for Director, which he then became.
Sethi in turn was promoted to Executive Director, and after a brief interregnum, Bill Coughran emerged to replace him in 1995.
Coughran, in turn, was selected (1998) to head the sadly ill-fated Bell Labs Silicon Valley research lab.
For a period after Coughran's move to California, Sethi was again nominal director, although he had to share his time by serving as Executive Director for us and other centers.
By this time, Al Aho, having left Bellcore and achieving academia by becoming head of the CS department at Columbia, was induced to return to Bell Labs and then (in what amounted to a job-swap with Sethi) became Director by 2000.
In 2002, Al returned to Columbia, this time aiming to teach and write (and not be their department head, he's happy to aver). Wim Sweldens, amid general relief in not enduring another interregnum, is now Director (in the old language) and entitled Vice President in the new.
The Center has (seemingly from the start) contributed in a variety of areas. Historically, first three seem to be the longest-lived; they are also so general that much CS research can be jammed into them one way or another.
However, it turns out that all of these were very much intertwined, and it's somewhat problematical to classify either the projects or the people. Many of us have simultaneously or successively worked in several of the areas. For example, is the work of Aho, Sethi, Ullman on parsing part of "languages" or algorithms? At what point does data networking shade into systems?
At the same time, there were some areas in which not much effort was spent: although there were connections and publications on databases, this area tended to be investigated from the algorithmic point of view, not in creating database systems. Some areas venues were avoided, e.g. artificial intelligence (unless you count the Thompson/Condon work on chess, which they don't consider AI).
In the early 1960s, the local systems research centered around the internally developed series of BESYS operating systems for the IBM 704 through 7094 machines. The work on BESYS was evidently scattered around Bell Labs, and it predates the center's formation. In 1964, E. E. David, together with Vic Vyssotsky, seem to have formed the main local force behind the collaboration of Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric in forming the Multics project. This led to the replacement of several of the large IBM systems at the Murray Hill and Whippany computer centers by GE gear (Holmdel and the new Indian Hill lab remained committed to IBM). This Multics work, even at Bell Labs, was distributed. Perhaps the most prominent local contribution was the EPL (Early PL/I) compiler, although there was in the later 1960s much other Multics-oriented work.
During the 1960s, the service facility providing general computation resources for Murray Hill remained organizationally under the control of research management. The support required significant resources: the mainframes were large, and needed operators who arranged to read cards, tend to printers, put output in boxes. There was also significant programming support and counseling of users, attending to OS upgrades and the like.
In 1969, two crises occurred: it was decided that Multics would not live up to its promises and would be dropped, and also that direct support of general computation for Murray Hill (and likewise other locations) didn't really belong in the research organization (127/137) where it had been centered, and thus a separate Murray Hill Comp Center was created as a service organization. Morgan continued as co-director of the two groups until the the end of 1970.
As of summer of 1969, the center's technical population numbered only 32, with 3 assistants. Many of us then were still from the original Math Center; others had joined from other parts of the Labs after the center's creation, but still others were fresh hires. This population was what remained after the separation of Comp Center support from 137.
The departure of Multics was certainly one of the sparks that ignited the late-60s and later work on Unix; this work continued well into the 1980s, and is documented elsewhere; there is a collection of papers about this. Work beginning in the 1980s explored various aspects of distributed computing, especially in connecting programmable terminals to central computers over thin wires: the Blit and Gnot series of terminals.
In the language area during the earlier 1960s, research contributions include McIlroy's work on macro-processors for assembly languages (BEFAP). Later work in the center would encompass B, C, then C++ and later (in a post-trivestiture ingraft) SML/NJ. In parallel with the Unix effort during the 1970s was influential work on "little languages," tools for text processing, and computer typesetting.
During the 1970s and after, a small but influential group contributed to CPU architecture, beginning with Fraser's experiments with C-oriented machines, and culminating in the Crisp and Hobbit microprocessors, by the 1980s incorporated into AT&T computers. Also in the 1980s, a series of innovative bit-map terminals were designed, again yielding products.
There are many more that could be detailed; a partial list includes design and analysis of digital and analog circuits (CAD tools), Optical character recognition and classification, graphics rendering, even computer chess.
When the center was established, the main resources for computing consisted of batch-oriented IBM 709x machines, and card decks and large prinouts were everywhere. Not everything was on paper; Ken Knowlton produced some of his first computer-generated movies here.
After the Multics project was begun, Murray Hill in particular, and to some extent Whippany switched to GE 635 and soon the new, Multics-ready GE 645. For most of the general computing population, batch in some form was still the norm. But by the end of the 1960s, interactive, terminal-based computation began to appear, with terminals and phone lines in people's homes, as well as some use of commercial dial-up time-sharing services. At first some of these terminals were used to connect to the CTSS system at MIT over WATS dial-up; after Multics development ceased by 1970, many of these terminals began to be used with early versions of Unix. The big central machines, by then badged Honeywell, and by thenrun by the separated Murray Hill Computation Center, also began to supply dial-in service both to homes and offices.
The help of Sam Morgan and Doug McIlroy has contributed immeasurably to this account in particular, but also to the life of the center over the years.
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