Re: [TUHS] AT&T Research

John Linderman: Every "divestiture" had an adverse effect on critical mass. The split between AT&T and Bellcore was a big hurt. The split between AT&T and Lucent was another. When I joined the Labs in 1973, it was an honor to work there. ==== Maybe I'm blinded because I wasn't there earlier, but to me, joining Bell Labs in 1984, just after the original divestiture that split off Bellcore, was still an honour. There were certainly good people I never had a chance to work with because they went to Bellcore, but in 1127 at least, morale was good, management stayed out of our way and encouraged researchers to work on whatever interested them, and a lot of good work was done even if that group was no longer the source of All UNIX Truth. (In fact I think we missed the boat on some things by being too inwardly-focussed, TCP/IP in particular, but divestiture didn't cause that.) It seemed to me that the rot didn't really begin to show until around 1990, the time I left (though not for that reason; this is hindsight). Upper management were visibly shifting focus from encouraging researchers to do what they did best to treating researchers as a source of new products to be marketed. The urge to break the company up further seems to me to have been a symptom, not a cause; the cause was a general corporate shift toward short-term profits rather than AT&T's traditional long-term view. AT&T was far from alone in making this mistake, and research in the US has suffered greatly all over as a result. I remember visiting a couple of years after I left, and chatting with my former department head. He said 1127 was having trouble convincing new researchers to join up because they'd heard (correctly) that the physics and chemistry research groups were being cut back, and feared computing science would have its own reckoning soon enough. In fact the corporate direction of the time was to cut back on the physical sciences and push to expand software research and development, but I don't blame the new researchers for being concerned (nor did my ex-DH), and in the long term they turned out to be more right than wrong. Nothing lasts forever, but the classic Bell Labs lasted a long time. We have nothing like it now. I don't think we'll have anything like it any time soon. That's sad. Norman Wilson Toronto ON